The Utility of Combining the IAD and SES Frameworks

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.

Commoning the seeds: alternative models of collective action and open innovation within French peasant seed groups for recreating local knowledge commons

“…;Hess 2012;McGinnis and Ostrom 2014;Cole et al 2019). The IAD/SES framework was used here as a diagnostic guideline to analyze the formal and informal rules-in-use within the PWBG groups and the political and institutional context framing their action arenas(Ostrom and Cox 2010;Ostrom and Basurto 2011).Figure 3summarizes the main components of an IAD/SES diagnostic…”

Advancing Water Sustainability in Megacities: Comparative Study of São Paulo and Delhi Using a Social-Ecological System Framework

“…Ostrom's SES framework was originally developed to study local common pool resources in relatively small-scale (largely rural) settings. It has subsequently been modified to study a wide variety of sustainability problems [14]. We found that, although its structure was broadly useful, we needed to modify it to be meaningful and relevant for large metropolitan settings.…”

“…In order to systematically study the plurality of conditions and modes of governance in our study cities, we draw on the SES framework suggested by Ostrom and colleagues [12,13]. Ostrom's SES framework consists of a set of core subsystems relating to the social and ecological dimensions, with associated variables organized within a multilevel, nested structure This nested structure supports finely grained analyses of social and ecological conditions, which is the chief strength of the SES framework [14]. The work by Ostrom and her colleagues shows how this framework can be used to integrate concepts and theories across different disciplines and to organize research from disparate empirical settings [12,13].…”

“…We develop this module by starting with the core subsystems and the full range of embedded variables and processes in Ostrom's framework and, then, adding (or eliminating) variables that, based on our empirical work, were found to be potentially the most (or least) influential in explaining the dynamics of the water system and its governance. We combine these detailed, variable-oriented analyses with the process-oriented descriptive case studies approach that describes how institutions emerge and change, influencing outcomes [14].…”

Sustainable Development Under Competing Claims on Land: Three Pathways Between Land-Use Changes, Ecosystem Services and Human Well-Being

“…To consider the temporal dynamics of land-use changes, we trace the actor interactions and their outcomes over the whole time period of the observed changes. By doing so, we distinguish two key phases of different context conditions: the time of the military government and the time after the transition to the new (semi-)civilian government starting in 2011/12 (Cole et al 2019). 1…”