How to Use The IAD Framework:
An Application to Elinor Ostrom’s
Governing the Commons
Michael D. McGinnis
mcginnis@[Link],
Revised Oct. 1, 2013
This summary is organized around
10 analytical steps identified in
“How to Use the IAD Framework,”
Mike McGinnis, Aug. 25, 2012
[[Link] ]
1. Decide if your primary concern is explanation of a puzzle
(why does outcome X occur in cases like Y, but not Z?)
or policy analysis
(what is likely to happen if current policy A would be replaced by policy B?
What would need to be done in order to implement B?).
Puzzle: Garrett Hardin concluded that all commons are doomed to
exhaustion, unless managed by a central authority or divided up
into private parcels, yet many such commons persist for very long
periods of time. How can that happen?
Policy: What can be done to improve the sustainability of common
pool resources? Can similar processes of monitoring and adaptive
learning occur in different ways under diverse ownership schemes
and governance arrangements?
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2. Summarize 2-3 plausible alternative explanations for why this
outcome occurs, or why your preferred outcome has not been realized;
express each as a dynamic explanation process.
a. Tragedy of the (Open Access) Commons: Resource levels are determined by
exogenous forces, since no one has taken responsibility to replenishment
resources or maintain relevant infrastructure, or if such efforts prove to be
insufficient to avoid collapse.
b. Privatized Commons: Individual property owners manage and maintain their
own private property in a cost-efficient manner, but need not be concerned
about anything beyond that.
c. Centrally managed commons: Rules for use and maintenance of resources
are set and enforced by external actors, and local herders respond to those
incentives.
d. User-managed commons: All (or most) of the rules for use and maintenance
of resources are set and/or enforced by local users.
Note: These are alternative institutional arrangements/processes, not explanations.
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3. Identify the focal (or core) action situation(s), the one (or a
few) arena(s) of interaction which you consider to be most
critical in one or more of these alternative explanations.
1. Appropriation of resource, combined with its natural renewal or
replenishment.
2. Maintenance of resource, including any infrastructural
improvements.
3. Rule-making, the collective process of formulating rules and
procedures for individual participation in appropriation and
maintenance activities.
4. Monitoring of how closely actual appropriation and maintenance
activities satisfy applicable rules and procedures, and sanctioning
rule violators.
Note: All four of these core processes would need to be completed in any of the institutional
alternatives listed on the previous slide.
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4. Systematically examine categories of the IAD framework to identify and
highlight the most critical (1) actors in positions, (2) rules in use, (3) attributes
of communities, (4) types of goods, (5) evaluative criteria, and (6) feedback
loops in these focal action situations.
1. Appropriation: Actors (users) may extract resource units from common-pool
resource system for personal use (consumption, exchange, or production), may
or may not follow rules on level, time, and technology of extraction, may or may
not be closely connected to each other in a tight community, and may or may
not be able to observe information on quality and quantity of resource available
for use.
2. Maintenance: Actors (users and/or others) may or may not contribute time,
money, and/or effort to collective activities to replenish resource and/or to
construct and maintain infrastructure for resource extraction, may or may not
follow rules on level, time, and technology of effort, may or may not be closely
connected to each other in a tight community, and may or may not be able to
observe information on quality and quantity of resource available for use.
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4. Systematically examine categories of the IAD framework to identify and highlight the most
critical (1) actors in positions, (2) rules in use, (3) attributes of communities, (4) types of goods, (5)
evaluative criteria, and (6) feedback loops in these focal action situations.
3. Rule-making: External authorities and/or local actors may or may not
participate in formulating formal or informal specifications of who has
legitimate access to resource system, as well as limitations on level,
time, and technology of extraction. Rule-makers may or may not be the
same people as those who appropriate or maintain resources, and are
generally not able to directly observe compliance with the rules they
have written.
4. Monitoring and Sanctioning: Those actors who can directly or indirectly
observe appropriation and maintenance activities and determine if
relevant rules have been violated and then decide whether to impose
sanctions on rule violators, may or may not be same people as those
who appropriate or maintain resources or who write these rules.
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5. Follow the information flow in each of these focal action situations. What sources
of information are available to which actors under which circumstances, and what
might prevent them from using that information to change the outcomes that result?
a. Institutions are all about processes, and decision processes require information.
b. Evaluative processes (involving individuals, organizations, or informal groups) can
take place in any action situation, and evaluations may occur before, during, or
after the making and implementation of any of their key points.
c. Evaluation requires access to information, which may or may not be available to
local actors or external rule-makers in a timely fashion.
d. Information may or may not be available in a timely manner. Appropriators and
those involved in maintenance activities should be able to observe short-term
variation in resource availability, but some changes may occur more quickly or
more abruptly than they can monitor and evaluate incoming information. Also,
actors may not have extensive records on longer-term trends or on the system’s
viability as a whole; systemic conditions and resource availability may change more
quickly than they can adjust their behavior.
e. Rules tend to change more slowly than the individual choices of appropriators and
those involved in maintenance. This disjuncture may lead to significant lags
between the emergence of new challenges and the initial response.
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6. Locate adjacent (or supplemental) action situations that determine the contextual categories
of the focal action situation, that is,
outcomes of adjacent situations in which collective actors are constructed and individual
incentives shaped, rules are written and collective procedures established, norms are internalized
and other community attributes are determined, goods are produced and inputs for production
are extracted from resource systems (that may need replenishment), and where evaluation,
learning, and feedback processes occur.
• In some situations, the same set of actors may play dominant roles in all four of
the core action situations. In such an “idealized” situation of a user group as a self-
governing community, those who appropriate resources are also responsible for
replenishing or maintaining that resource, as well as making and enforcing rules on
both appropriation and maintenance, and on the way these rules are written and
outcomes evaluated. Such “perfect isolation” is hard to imagine in most sectors of
a modern political economy, but it does present a standard for comparison.
• Analysis of many, especially smaller-scale, common-pool resource extraction
regimes can be completed with little or no explicit reference to any of these
supplemental action situations adjacent to the focal action situations. This was the
case for most of the studies reviewed by Ostrom. But not for other settings.
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6. Locate adjacent (or supplemental) action situations
• Constitutive Processes: One important function not explicitly identified in the list above is
the construction of collective actors who have the authority to act, or whose members act
as if they have such authority.
• Dispute Resolution: Action situations in which disputes among any of the actor types
engaged in focal action situations are brought to some resolution. An especially relevant
concern is whether or not “dispute deciders” take into account the interests of the
community as a whole in their evaluation of disputes arriving at disputes, or if they rely
exclusively on the merits of arguments made on behalf of directly involved parties.
• Knowledge: New scientific knowledge is typically generated by researchers not directly
involved in focal activities. However, indigenous actors may have access to substantial bodies
of local knowledge that may or may not be consistent with current scientific findings.
• Market Conditions: The economic value of extracted resource units may vary widely,
depending on trends in any of the markets to which these resources are connected, including
markets that may be distant from the place of extraction.
• Political Regime Changes: Victories by new leaders or political parties or regimes may result
in fundamental changes in the rules governing the types of organizations or informal groups
that are authorized or allowed to make decisions regarding appropriation, maintenance, rule-
making, monitoring, sanctioning, and forming new collective entities.
• Cultural and Demographic Change: Driven primarily by exogenous changes in livelihoods
and cultural trends, which are unlikely to directly manipulable by any actors, especially in the
short term. In some setting these changes may reflect subtle influences on local practices
driven by longer-term tendencies driven by globalization.
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8. Compare and contrast the ways these linked and nested action situations are interrelated in
the processes emphasized by each of your alternative explanations.
Do the same actors write, implement, and enforce rules?
How do outcomes of other action situations shape processes of information flow and evaluation
in the focal action situation(s)?
Which incentives or values are reinforced or undermined by outcomes of action situations?
• In Hardin’s tragedy of the (open-access) commons, only the appropriation/ and natural
replenishment action situations are explicitly considered.
• In a centrally managed commons, the rule-making function is undertaken by official
authorities, who may write rules regarding both appropriation and maintenance. These rules
are likely to be based on the recommendations of outside experts instead of those familiar
with local conditions. Any central authority would need regular access to real-time accurate
information on the extent to which resource users follow the rules enacted by this authority.
Ostrom’s findings suggest that local monitors would be needed to make externally imposed
rules be effective.
• In a privatized commons, appropriation and maintenance activities would be undertaken by
each private owner separately, perhaps in conjunction with other owner/users. Exchange of
extracted resources would be governed by contract law and other provisions of market
regulation. Responsibility for monitoring and sanctioning would typically fall upon police and
courts. Externally-driven market dynamics would be an especially important consideration for
this case.
• In most of the cases of long and enduring institutions for community-based management of
common-pool resources discussed in Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, essentially the same
set of actors is directly involved in all four focal action situations.
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Don’t Overlook Chapter 6 (from Lin’s Dissertation!)
• The example of groundwater governance in southern California involved
a diverse array of organizational actors at multiple levels of aggregation
• Critical contributions made by constitutive, judicial, scientific processes
(occurring in adjacent or supplemental action situations!)
• Scientific experts in USGS clarified danger of saltwater incursion, facilitated cooperation
• A new law empowered groups to establish new entities, with taxing authority, and
allowed to run programs like freshwater infusion
• Users used courts to impose constraints on themselves, by setting up special water
districts, which restricted use and levied taxes, and resolved disputes over details
• Raymond Basin actors negotiated agreement based on mutual prescription
(proportional cutbacks), hold-outs challenged in court, lost, appealed, lost again
• West Basin Water Assoc. established, sued in 1945, city of Hawthorne as hold-out,
decided upon proportional cutbacks, and courts forced hold-outs to comply
• Combined West-Central Basins District Authority formed to limit pumping, replenish
water levels, inject freshwater barrier
• Watermaster played critical role in all legal agreements – source of information and
dispute resolution, but not enforcement or sanctioning
• New institutions were built by an incremental, sequential, self-transforming
process of learning and joint discussions, within supportive state (home-rule)
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Design principles specify conditions for the decision processes in common property institutions
applied to resource management issues, but each of these conditions may have been established
and/or maintained by the outcomes of multiple action situations.
• Ostrom concluded that all of the long and enduring institutions in her cases satisfied eight design
principles. Each of the design principles can be interpreted as attributes of one or more of the core and
supplemental action situations identified above. For example, (1) clear boundaries can emerge from
constitutive processes, competition among neighboring groups, and local resource knowledge. (2) rule-
making will have wide participation if those suffering grievances have dispute resolutions processes
available for redress, (3) long-term sustainability can’t persist unless appropriation and maintenance rules
become congruent with local conditions and values, (4) monitoring done by monitors responsible to the
core users will generate useful knowledge, (5) sanctioning applied in a graduated fashion can reinforce
shared community values, (6) processes for the resolution of disputes that are widely available and
operate at a reasonable cost in time and effort can also reinforce shared values, (7) constitutive processes
that can be carried out relatively easily facilitate the establishment and operation of limited-task teams,
and (8) organizations established by legitimate constitutive processes will have sufficient autonomy to
make meaningful allocations of resources.
• Subsequent research has highlighted other contributing factors that were also present in most of the cases
examined by Ostrom, specifically, of leadership, a shared concern for long-term outcomes, access to
timely information, and trust and reciprocity norms. These additional requirements can be connected to
core and supplementary processes if (1) effective leadership is demonstrated in all settings, (2) long-term
concerns are incorporated in dispute resolution and other evaluative processes, (3) information is
available in a timely fashion for all monitoring and evaluative processes, and (4) trust and reciprocity
norms are reinforced by participation in most or all of these processes.
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9. Identify the most critical steps for more detailed analysis, by isolating components of adjacent
action situations that determine the context currently in place in the focal action situation(s), and
that if changed would result in fundamental changes in outcomes.
But remember if you change one contextual factor in one action situation, then you must also
incorporate all relevant changes in closely related action situations.
(Ceteris paribus is more complicated in institutional analysis!)
• Monitoring turned out to play a surprisingly important role in much of Ostrom’s analysis. This means that
evaluation of any policy reform cannot be complete without careful consideration of the means though
which these new rules will be monitored, and who will be responsible for conducting and overseeing
this monitoring.
• Processes of resource extraction and replenishment/maintenance are very closely related, and it may be
critical that the same actors are involved in both sets of activities. Otherwise, it is difficult to give those
involved in the former activities the appropriate incentives to complete the latter.
• Different combinations of biophysical conditions, cultural predilections, and rules in use will construct
fundamentally different settings for all of the key processes of appropriation, maintenance, rule-making
and monitoring and sanctioning, as well as the supplemental action situations identified above.
• The strongest evidence comes from studies with clear research designs allowed for direct comparisons
between similar cases. Among the best studies are
– Comparisons of agency and farmer managed irrigation systems in Nepal
– Comparisons of protected forests in similar ecological settings but managed under different types of
property rights
– Remote images of the boundaries of protected areas, some of which show sharp demarcations
between ecological conditions under different regimes and other boundaries which are more
difficult to see
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10. Draw upon principles of research design or evaluative research to select cases for
further analysis by whatever methods are best suited to that purpose.
Follow relevant conventions when writing up your conclusions;
DO NOT describe this process of discovery in detail.
• Ostrom’ s analysis was based on multiple methods: a systematic comparison of existing case
studies, supplemented by new field research as well as innovative use of game models and
laboratory experiments.
• Many of the conditions in Ostrom’s list of eight design principles tend to be more easily
realized in tightly-knit communities of users whose livelihood are critically dependent on
the continued availability of particular resources than they can be in larger and more
technically complex sectors of a modern political economy.
• All focal and supplemental action situations are dynamic, and the feedback processes most
critical for each remain a promising subject for future analysis. In particular, more attention
could be devoted to understanding processes of learning at the individual, group, and
organizational levels and their interactions. Of particular importance is consideration of the
time scales at which endogenous changes and exogenous shocks operate in dynamic
resource systems.
• When analyzing proposals to cope with the complexities of global climate change, Ostrom
emphasized that many different positive and negative externalities can be realized at all
levels of aggregation from neighborhoods to the world as a whole. Thus, groups at all levels
need to be involved in devising and monitoring practices that can contribute to this overall
effort. A full representation of the detailed structure of such a multi-level and polycentric
package of policy proposals remains a topic for future research.
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