Please read the text below and answer.Elinor Ostrom often used an interdisciplinary approach to understand environmental problems. What are some merits of such an approach

Who is Elinor Ostrom? Her scholarly contributions are invaluable. Through her research, Ostrom has demonstrated that shared resources need not be destroyed by communities, as many experts had previously believed. Instead, local self-governance could offer a viable solution to several of our environmental challenges.

Elinor Ostrom was born in Beverly Hills, California in 1933. Growing up during the Great Depression, Elinor's family struggled to make ends meet, but she learned valuable skills from her large backyard garden. Despite facing challenges such as stuttering and feeling like a "poor kid in a rich kid's school," Elinor attended Beverly Hills High School and joined the debate team. Her experiences inspired her to study institutions for collective action, which earned her the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. Lin had to overcome many obstacles to become the successful researcher she is today. Despite her mother's lack of support, Lin was determined to attend college. She worked part-time jobs to pay for her tuition fees and graduated without any debt. However, when Lin entered the workforce, she discovered that gender roles were strictly enforced, and women were often restricted to jobs like clerical work or teaching. Despite this, Lin managed to get a job as an Assistant Personnel Manager for a law firm that previously only hired women for secretarial positions. This job helped her career, but she wanted more. She took a course in public administration while working at UCLA and became interested in the subject. She pursued further education and obtained a Master's degree in 1962 and a PhD in political science in 1965, despite facing gender-based prejudice. For example, many members of the faculty at the Economics Department at UCLA did not want women in their program and discouraged Lin from pursuing a PhD. The Political Science Department was also hesitant to admit women to their PhD program, as they believed that only a city college would hire a woman with a PhD. Despite these challenges, Lin persevered and was eventually admitted to a class of 40 students with three other women.Researching governance & the environment Lin studied water management in Southern California for her graduate research. Specifically, she studied the polycentric water governance system that had emerged in the region. In 1945, over-drafting a groundwater basin that lay beneath western Los Angeles caused saltwater from the nearby coast to leak into basin, damaging the city's water supply. In response, several individuals in the community came together and established a water association, implementing new measures such as new water usage rules and a water replenishment district that effectively restored the groundwater basin. Lin's dissertation focused on such polycentric systems of governance, but her graduate work also exposed her to common pool resource problems. In addition, Lin became very familiar with the types of problems that common pool resource users face and witnessed first-hand how they came together to create solutions. Lin's graduate work was a prelude to her subsequent work on common pool resources (it was only after Ostrom defended her dissertation in 1965 that Garrett Hardin's article on "The Tragedy of the Commons" was published! Fret not, we will understand these ideas better in the following weeks). While in graduate school, Lin met and married her second husband - political scientist Vincent Ostrom - and they became academic partners in crime. In 1965, Indiana University Bloomington offered Vincent an attractive position as Full Professor. He accepted the offer on the condition that Lin was granted a faculty position, a common practice in academia where a 'trailing spouse' is sometimes granted a 'courtesy appointment'. This courtesy sure did the university well. Thereafter, Lin began as a Visiting Assistant Professor teaching a 7.30am 'Introduction to American Government' class that nobody else would take and slowly worked her way up the academic ladder, becoming a Full Professor in 1974. In the first 15 years of Lin's research career at Indiana University, she focused on studying the structure and performance of police departments across the United States. The goal was to find out whether smaller police departments or larger and more centralised police departments provided better services. Her research took place amidst increasing calls for the consolidation of public services, but the results of her findings led her to conclude that polycentric systems trumped centralised bureaucracies, much against the tide of scholarly opinion at the time. Lin's life's work was dedicated to studying the management of common pool resources at a local level, which challenged Garrett Hardin's theory of the "Tragedy of the Commons". Rather than just theorizing about the issue, Lin conducted years of fieldwork studying forests in Nepal, irrigation systems in Spain, mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan, and fisheries in Maine and Indonesia. Her findings are recorded in her book "Governing the Commons", which was published in 1990.

Lin worked alongside her husband Vincent and scholars from around the world at the Indiana University's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, a research center that she and her husband founded and managed for 39 years. The Workshop believed in a hands-on approach to social science, preferring to interact and learn from those they studied. They emphasized interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

Lin's work was interdisciplinary and she moved between the fields of political science, economics, ecology, psychology, and anthropology. She was an innovative scholar who used tools such as game theory, agent-based modeling, and geographic information systems to analyze common resource problems.

In 2009, Lin became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons. Lin was a remarkable woman who overcame prejudice and received the Nobel prize for economics with little formal training in economics. She remained humble throughout her career, donating all the prize money to the Workshop for scholarships, as her work was a collective effort.

Lin and her husband Vincent received the University Medal, the highest award given by Indiana University in 2010. Time magazine named Lin one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2012. When Lin passed away on June 12, 2012, she was a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, senior research director of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at IU, and founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. Lin's legacy was the hundreds of students, researchers, and colleagues who learned from and were inspired by her.