No abstract

Elinor Ostrom's IAD (Institutional Analysis and Development) and SES (Social-Ecological Systems) frameworks are widely used by social scientists and policy analysts, but many applications fail to take full advantage of the potential utility of either framework. The IAD framework lacks detail regarding the specific variables that influence social interactions and neglects questions of asymmetric power and collective evaluation. The SES framework, meanwhile, supports detailed variable-oriented analyses of social-ecological systems, but rarely addresses the dynamic processes that lie at the heart of the IAD framework. We outline a Combined IAD-SES (CIS) Framework that remedies these problems by combining them in a format suited both to social-ecological systems and other policy settings. Institutional analysts using this combined framework should start their analysis by identifying a set of focal action situations, learning how the relevant collective and constitutional choice arenas shaped their structures, and then thinking deeply about the processes through which those conditions have been (or might be) changed. We demonstrate the potential utility of CIS by applying it to previous research on Maine's lobster fishery.

Property rights are fundamental to economic analysis. There is, however, no consensus in the economic literature about what property rights are. Economists define them variously and inconsistently, sometimes in ways that deviate from the conventional understandings of legal scholars and judges. This article explores ways in which definitions of property rights in the economic literature diverge from conventional legal understandings, and how those divergences can create interdisciplinary confusion and bias economic analyses. Indeed, some economists' idiosyncratic definitions of property rights, if used to guide policy, could lead to suboptimal economic outcomes. (JEL K11, Q15)

In Kenya, as in many developing countries, centralized control over water resources was implemented to improve agricultural productivity. By the 1980s, however, Kenya's postindependence policies of bureaucratic control were in disarray, and conflicts over water use were common. More recently, Kenya has embarked on a series of reforms that create a polycentric approach to water governance, in which decision making about water resources is shared among multiple, overlapping local, regional, and national authorities. Drawing on archival and field research, we examine these reforms in their historic context and argue that whereas centralized control was poorly adapted to the Kenyan context, polycentric governance is better suited to Kenya's variable social and ecological conditions and the available resources of its administrative agencies.