Understanding Institutional Diversity

Summary

The fullest statement of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. Ostrom breaks any situation where people interact under rules into a common set of parts. That gives a shared language for comparing institutions as different as markets, firms, legislatures, and commons.

Why it’s useful here

• A toolkit for analyzing (and designing) how a shared server, network, or service is actually governed, beyond a checklist of principles.
• Rule types map directly onto community tech decisions: who can join (boundary), who can do what (position/choice), who sees logs (information).
• Levels of choice separate the day-to-day admin rules from the rules for changing rules, and from the founding charter.

Key ideas

• Action situation parts: participants, positions, actions, outcomes, action-outcome linkages, information, costs/benefits
• Rule types: boundary, position, choice, aggregation, information, payoff, scope
• Levels of analysis: operational, collective-choice, constitutional, metaconstitutional. The outcomes of each level are the rules for the level below.
• Includes the grammar of institutions (ADICO) and revisits the design principles

Related

• crawford-ostrom-1995-grammar-of-institutions.md
• ostrom-2010-beyond-markets-and-states.md
• ostrom-1990-governing-the-commons.md
• hess-ostrom-2007-understanding-knowledge-as-a-commons.md