It is difficult to say when I began work on this study. If one asks when I first began to study problems of collective action faced by individuals using common-pool resources, then identifying the beginning is easier. In the early 1960s, I took a graduate seminar with Vincent Ostrom, who was to become my closest colleague and husband. The seminar focused on the development of institutions related to water resources in southern California. I began my dissertation focusing on the entrepreneurship involved in developing a series of public enterprises to halt the process of saltwater intrusion into a groundwater basin underlying a portion of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. A fellow graduate student, Louis Weschler, conducted a parallel study in an adjacent groundwater basin that adopted different institutional arrangements to cope with similar problems. As Weschler and I completed our studies, it appeared that both institutional arrangements had been successful in enabling the water producers to avoid the catastrophic economic loss that would have occurred if both basins had been inundated by the Pacific Ocean (E. Ostrom 1965; Weschler 1968).

In the late 1960s, Vincent and I participated in the Great Lakes Research Program initiated by the Batelle Memorial Institute (V. Ostrom and E. Ostrom 1977b), but most of my work as a young faculty member focused on problems of urban service delivery and public economies in metropolitan areas. In 1981 I was asked by Paul Sabatier, a colleague for a year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld, to make a seminar presentation on “organizational learning.” I used as my example of organizational learning the set of rules that groundwater producers had developed in the southern California groundwater basins. Paul then wanted to know why I was so confident that the systems I had studied 15 years earlier were still operating and performing well. At the time, I had no effective answer other than that the institutions had been so well crafted to fit local circumstances that I presumed they had survived and were faring well.

When I returned from Bielefeld, I suggested to one of my doctoral students, William Blomquist, that he answer Sabatier's question as his dissertation. Blomquist (1987b) found that the institutions that the water producers themselves had designed were still in place and operating effectively. The physical condition of the basins had improved substantially.