Critical Institutionalism

International Journal of the Commons
Vol. 9, no 1 March 2015, pp. 1–18

Publisher: Uopen Journals
URL:http://www.thecommonsjournal.org
URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-116918
Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN: 1875-0281
Furthering critical institutionalism
Frances Cleaver
King’s College London, UK
frances.cleaver@kcl.ac.uk
Jessica de Koning
Wageningen University, the Netherlands
Jessica.dekoning@wur.nl
Abstract: This special issue furthers the study of natural resource management
from a critical institutional perspective. Critical institutionalism (CI) is a
contemporary body of thought that explores how institutions dynamically
mediate relationships between people, natural resources and society. It focuses
on the complexity of institutions entwined in everyday social life, their historical
formation, the interplay between formal and informal, traditional and modern
arrangements, and the power relations that animate them. In such perspectives
a social justice lens is often used to scrutinise the outcomes of institutional
processes. We argue here that critical institutional approaches have potentially
much to offer commons scholarship, particularly through the explanatory power
of the concept of bricolage for better understanding institutional change. Critical
institutional approaches, gathering momentum over the past 15 years or so, have
excited considerable interest but the insights generated from different disciplinary
perspectives remain insufficiently synthesised. Analyses emphasising complexity
can be relatively illegible to policy-makers, a fact which lessens their reach. This
special issue therefore aims to synthesise critical institutional ideas and so to lay the
foundation for moving beyond the emergent stage to make meaningful academic
and policy impact. In bringing together papers here we define and synthesise key
themes of critical institutionalism, outline the concept of institutional bricolage
and identity some key challenges facing this school of thought.
Keywords: Agency, common-pool resources, critical institutionalism,

institutional bricolage, institutions
2 Frances Cleaver and Jessica de Koning
1. Introduction
1.1. Challenges to institutional scholarship
In their article reviewing scholarly trends in studying common property resources
(CPR), Van Laerhoven and Ostrom wrote ‘Regarding the future, we think that
scholars must embrace the challenge of finding ways to deal more explicitly with
complexity, uncertainty and institutional dynamics’ (Van Laerhoven and Ostrom
2007, 5). They elaborated on the need for developing a keener eye for complexity
at scale, for examining multi-use and multi commons and for the household use
of private and public resources. This special issue furthers critical approaches to
the study of institutions that address such challenges and explain both continuity
and change in evolving institutions.
All analytical approaches face similar challenges in explaining the emergence,
form and functioning of institutions. There is a need to place local institutional
arrangements within the wider frames of governance (the political ecology and
political economy) which shape the possibilities for resource allocation, adaptation
and negotiated solutions. Institutional analysts must explain how institutions are
animated by people, acting individually or collectively in particular spaces, in
relation to others, and to the physical and material environment. Further, there is
the challenge of showing how power works to sustain institutions and to shape
participation, access and outcomes. In addressing such issues, institutionalists
deal with complexity, uncertainty and institutional dynamics in relation to a
multiplicity of factors. These include the interaction between ecological and
social systems; the diversity of livelihoods, resources and uses; the variability
of actors and their practices within heterogeneous communities; multiple and
overlapping scales, domains and timescales of interaction; the often opaque ways
in which institutions work and power operates; and the variability of outcomes
produced. Faced with such multiple complexities, analysts need to combine the
generation of rich, context specific accounts of institutional functioning with the
identification of recurring patterns of governance and societal resource allocation.
Papers in this special issue address these and related challenges through a
critical institutional lens, often deploying the concept of bricolage to further the
study of institutional dynamics. Most of the papers included here are concerned with
development, policy or project interventions to manage common pool resources
or public goods and services. Saunders (2014) suggests that commons scholarship
may well have inadvertently contributed to the unfulfilled expectations of many
such interventions partly because concepts such as participation, social capital,
social learning and empowerment have proved difficult to craft into workable
arrangements. Further, CPR theory often struggles to effectively conceptualise
socially embedded resource users and so to fully understand norms, values and
interests; in focusing on efficiency and functionality CPR theory may overlook
the ways in which local dynamics are shaped by interactions at multiple scales
(see also Blaikie 2006). Similarly, mainstream commons scholarship has been
critiqued for dealing inadequately with heterogeneity within communities, for
Furthering critical institutionalism 3
skating over the politics of policies, discourses and local power dynamics, and
for lack of meaningful conceptualisation of the social relations and meanings
associated with natural resource management (Hall et al. 2014). In the sections
that follow we outline critical institutional approaches and to suggest how they
begin to address such deficiencies.
2. Critical institutionalism: concepts and themes

Critical institutionalism as a school of thought has emerged partly in critique
of mainstream institutionalism as epitomised by the work of Elinor Ostrom
and her followers.1 However, critical institutionalism is also partially indebted
to such mainstream institutionalism, and several authors claim that that there is
considerable promise in attempts to find complementaries between the perspectives
(Bruns 2009; Komakech and van der Zaag 2011; Ingram et al. 2015). However,
we maintain that in key premises about complexity, the nature of human action,
about the centrality of power dynamics, and the concern with social justice,
critical institutionalism offers different and revealing insights.
Various authors have attempted to understand local resource management
dynamics from different critical perspectives. These have emphasised the
need to focus more on socio-historical or social-anthropological dimensions of
interactions, their meanings beyond abstraction or use for economic purposes
and their embeddedness in daily life and in historical trajectories (Mosse 1997;
Roth 2009). Some critical scholars focus explicitly on the outcomes of resource
management arrangements and the implications for social justice (Johnson 2004).
Related to this are concerns for the power relations which imbue the spaces of
collective action and way that this limits participation and access to benefits for
some (Wong 2009). Perspectives that incorporate insights from political ecology
and political economy emphasise the effects of broader societal governance
arrangements of local institutions (Blaikie 2006). Critical institutional scholars
often query the idea that institutions can be crafted to be efficient, a scepticism
that is partly supported by evidence of the uneven functioning of decentralised
forest and water governance arrangements (for example see Boelens 2009; De
Koning 2011; Chowns 2014).2
Critical institutionalism draws on a wide pool of literature beyond the study
of the commons. It incorporates insights from scholarship on hybrid economic
and security arrangements in informal African economies and on the nature of the
state, citizenship and the everyday politics of access to public goods and service
1
In our usage the term ‘critical’ is used to reflect a debt to critical realist thinking which recognises
diversity in social phenomena, the potentially creative effects of individual agency and the influence
of social structures in shaping individual behaviour and the patterning of outcomes. The term is also
used in the tradition of critical social theories which suggest that knowledge should be used not just
to explain the social world but to change it in progressive directions.
2
We loosely combine such authors under the umbrella label of critical institutionalism, though they
would not necessarily recognize or use that label themselves.
delivery (Olivier de Sardan 2008; Hagmann and Péclard 2010; Jones 2015); the
efficacy of community based approaches to development (Dill 2010); and the
nature of property and access (Sikor and Lund 2009). These intersecting literatures
offer valuable insights into the formation of institutional norms through everyday
practices (Arts et al. 2013), and through the authoritative allocation of resources
in ‘twilight’ institutional zones (Lund 2006).
Synthesising insights from these varied approaches we propose the following
as a thumbnail sketch of critical institutionalism. Critical institutionalists question
the underlying rational choice assumptions of much institutional thinking. Instead
they emphasize the multi-scalar complexity of institutions entwined in everyday
social life; their historic formation dynamically shaped by creative human
actions; and the interplay between the traditional and the modern, formal and
informal arrangements. From this perspective rules, boundaries and processes are
‘fuzzy’; people’s complex social identities, unequal power relationships and wider
political and geographical factors shape resource management arrangements and
outcomes. Institutions are not necessarily designed for a particular purpose, but
borrowed or adapted from other working arrangements People’s motivations to
cooperate in collective arrangements are a mix of economic, emotional, moral
and social rationalities informed by differing logics and world-views. Institutions
are dynamic in that they operationalised by human actions, and there is no simple
relationship between institutional form and outcomes.
2.1. Institutional bricolage

The concept of institutional bricolage (De Koning 2011, 2014; Cleaver 2012) has
good explanatory power in showing how norms are articulated, explaining both
institutional endurance and change, enriching understanding of human agency
and relations of authority and in questioning assumptions about institutional
effectiveness. Adapted from Levi-Strauss’ formulation of intellectual bricolage,
this concept has also been developed by academics in the context of livelihood
studies (Batterbury 2001) organizational studies (Freeman 2007), religious
anthropology (Galvan 1997) and more. This article and the special issue mostly
build on the work by Douglas (1987) on institutional bricolage.
Institutional bricolage is a process through which people, consciously and
non-consciously, assemble or reshape institutional arrangements, drawing on
whatever materials and resources are available, regardless of their original
purpose. In this process, old arrangements are modified and new ones invented.
Institutional components from different origins are continuously reused, reworked,
or refashioned to perform new functions. Adapted configurations of rules,
practices, norms and relationships are attributed meaning and authority. These
refurbished arrangements are the necessary responses to everyday challenges, and
are embedded in daily practice. Bricolage is a fundamentally dynamic process
characterised by variable levels of institutional visibility and functioning. Let us
briefly elaborate and illustrate these points.
In the reworking of the existing institutional arrangements, actors innovate,

but they do so within the limits of their resources, social circumstances and
what is perceived as legitimate. As De Koning (2011), adapting Levi-Strauss,
suggests; the bricoleur might make a lampshade out of an umbrella stand but the
same umbrella stand cannot be made into a space shuttle. The layering of these
arrangements over time, changes in policy environments and in political and social
discourses also ensure that the mechanisms that form institutions can be pieced
together from a variety of sources (Sehring 2009; Marin and Bjorkland 2015).
Institutions so formed are therefore a patchwork of the new and second hand and
they include: habitual ways of doing things; well-worn practices adapted to new
conditions; organisational arrangements invented or borrowed from elsewhere.
Such pieced together institutions often have multipurpose functions. They
are rarely organised only according to single purposes, sectoral divisions or
particular projects. Even if they begin that way, they often evolve to encompass
other purposes and layers of meaning (Verzijl and Dominguez 2015). An example
is the women’s savings group that also collects the water tariff (Cleaver 2002),
or a community forest management association that functions as a social security
mechanism in case of illness (De Koning 2011). Pieced together or adapted,
multifunctional arrangements must be made to seem familiar, to fit with accepted
logics of practice and social relationships. It is this perceived fit that gives adapted
institutions their legitimacy and so facilitates the exercise of authority through
them. Institutions are ‘naturalised’ (Douglas 1987) through a number of processes
ranging from calls on tradition (which may be invented or re-invented); on
symbols, discourses and power relationships borrowed from other settings; and
by analogy to accepted ways of doing things, to the social order and to ideas of
rightness in relation to social, natural or spiritual worlds (Douglas 1987).
Elaborating on the processes of naturalizing institutions, De Koning (2011,
2014) categorises these and identifies three processes which happen when formalised
institutions are introduced into local settings: aggregation, alteration and articulation.
Aggregation relates to the re-creative re-combination of the introduced institutions
with different types of institutional and socio-cultural elements. This process entails
mixing the old with the new in order to create a more practical, useful institutional
framework. Alteration refers to the tweaking of and tinkering with institutions to
make them fit better with livelihood priorities or claims to identity. Articulation
involves the asserting of traditional identities and culture in resistance to newly
introduced institutional arrangements (De Koning 2011).
Bearing the features of critical institutional approaches and bricolage in mind
we will now discuss some key themes, indicating the insights they offer and the
questions they raise for the study of the commons.
3. Institutional dynamics: plurality, hybrity, and scale

Critical institutionalists embrace plurality and recognise that the governance of
resources occurs through a variety of scales with no very clear boundary between
the domains of the local and the global. Indeed national and global processes
can be seen as working out in local institutions and relationships (Sandström
2008). The concept of the ‘leakage of meaning’ is crucial here (Douglas 1987).
Meaning in the form of legitimized discourses, arrangements, symbolic authority
and values, leaks or is borrowed from one domain to another. Thus villagers in
Zimbabwe debating whether the poorest person should be exempt from paying
maintenance charges for the waterpump, draw variously on common experiences
of hardship (to justify equal application of the rules) and on concepts of universal
human rights, borrowed from international development discourses, to argue for
exemptions for the most vulnerable (Cleaver 2012).
Critical institutionalists view historical trajectories as important because
they shape contemporary institutions. The concept of path dependence has some
traction here – not in a deterministic way, but in the sense that institutions are
formed in sedimented layers of governance arrangements (Van der Heijden 2011;
Peters et al. 2012). Governance configurations do not simply supersede one
another in chronological order but contemporary institutional arrangements may
draw patchily on the discourses, and sanctioned meanings of previous eras. The
scope for invention, negotiation and resource allocation is also shaped by what
went before (Sehring 2009; Upton 2009; De Koning 2011).
Commons scholarship has often focused on community based institutions but a
promising direction for critical institutionalism is in explaining how change occurs
at the messy middle – the meso level of institutions (Peters et al. 2012). An increasing
concern of policy is how to operationalise decentralised resource management at
scale – for example at district levels of government, and through nested institutions.
We could argue that the messy middle comprises of a number of interfaces (Berkes
1989; Long 2001) between scales of organisations, between sets of values, between
professional and lay knowledge, between individual, community and state action. It
is at these interfaces that much bricolage work is done to navigate between different
interests, to blend and smooth out some of the discrepancies between regulation and
practice. Here we can see the blending of logics, the leakage of meaning, the exercise
of authoritative power, as well as the creative exercise of agency, the generation of
practical governance and the stubborn persistence of inequities (Funder and Marani
2015; Jones 2015; Marin and Bjorkland 2015).
We have argued that critical institutional approaches embrace the complexity
of natural resource management arrangements (the pluralities of actors, scales,
uses, values and meanings). However, this complexity remains challenging in a
number of ways. These include challenges to analysis – if institutions encapsulate
multiple scales, overlap, evolve over time and operate partially and intermittently
then they are very tricky phenomena to study. So for example, Komakech (2013)
notes that his attempts to map institutional arrangements across a whole river basin
proved unworkably complex, and therefore he adopted a more partial approach of
‘following the water’ and observing institutional arrangements encountered along
the way. It can be difficult to capture the dynamic nature of institutional evolution
and functioning without in-depth longitudinal studies. Papers in this volume show
the need for understanding the varying logics and intensity of different strands of
governance arrangements operating concurrently (Ingram et al. 2015; Marin and
Bjorkland 2015) and the need to study different modes of governance using one
framework (Jones 2015).
3.1. Can bricolage be facilitated? Can it be transformatory?

The blending, layering and piecing together involved in bricolage can generate
‘thickness’ in institutions, and helps to explain their endurance through adaptation
over time. However path dependence, power relations and national and global
governance frameworks can also constrain attempts to innovate and negotiate.
Questions arise here about the extent to which institutional complexity offers
greater opportunities for actors to negotiate and innovate, to choose how to piece
together their livelihoods. Some (Funder and Marani 2015; Ingram et al. 2015)
see bricolage as a strategy for dealing with fragmented or weak governance
arrangements. Such governance voids provide space for bricoleurs to improvise and
to create arrangements tailored to fit local circumstances; but the effects of these on
different actors may vary. Indeed, multiple social networks can dilute rather than
strengthen institutions, shifting and dividing people’s attention and ensuring only
their only partial enrolment with any particular governance arrangement (Meagher
2005). Others see bricolage as the necessary rite of passage for any contemporary
institution to become embedded in everyday life (De Koning and Benneker 2013).
Taking examples of different scholars working in the Usangu plains in Tanzania
we find various perspectives on the possibilities offered by institutional pluralism.
Els Lecoutere (2011), writing of irrigation management initially found less conflict
than she expected in a multi-livelihood situation and claims that institutional
pluralism can increase the potential for creativity and for pragmatic conflict
resolution for some actors. Odgaard’s (2002) study long term study of customary
and state arrangements for land and water management in the same region,
suggests rather that these work in tandem to ensure the double disadvantaging
of already marginalised people (pastoralists, poor women, fisherfolk). Research
by Cleaver and colleagues (2013) shows that politically marginalized pastoralists
can indeed choose to selectively engage with institutions which align with their
interests and to dynamically adapt others through bricolage. However this is
insufficient to overcome the ways that state policies and economic trends work
against them to restrict their pastoralist livelihoods.
So institutional plurality poses a challenge for critical scholars and for those
practitioners concerned with facilitating bricolage to secure social, economic and
environmental change (Nunan 2006; Merrey and Cook 2012). There is a growing
concern in development related literature with identifying ‘arrangements that
work’ – conceptualised as the practical hybrid mechanisms that people create to
get a job done and ensure meaning and social fit (Booth 2012; De Herdt 2013;
Jones 2015). In common with many ‘wicked problems’, resource management
issues and the fairness of institutional arrangements depends on the viewpoint
of the person perceiving them (Venot 2011). It is highly unlikely that a single
institutional solution will represent all users and livelihood interests. However
practical and policy approaches often require simplification and standardisation
of institutional form. Morris et al. (2013) describe how one NGO programme
promoting community based natural resource management in Tanzania, moved
away from supporting designed institutions (water user associations) towards a
process of promoting facilitated stakeholder learning forums, bringing together
actors who would be unlikely to interact in planned institutional structures.
4. Agency, power, and governance

Critical institutional perspectives offer rich understandings of the ways in which
individuals shape institutions and in turn are shaped by them. These perspectives
depart from the bounded rationality model common to mainstream commons
scholarship in which utility–based explanations predominate in accounting for
people’s choices. CI approaches enrich this rather thin model of human agency in
a number of ways.
First, drawing on social theory, CI scholarship treads a middle ground between
structural accounts of agency in which people’s actions are defined by their place in
the social system (the roles, norms and forms of cognition that this imposes), with
post-structural emphases on diversity and creativity of identities and practices.
From a CI perspective, actors do indeed strategize, innovate and negotiate in their
engagement with institutions and management of natural resources. However,
the particular ways they do so are shaped by their multi-layered social identities,
changing contexts and the web of relationships within which they live their lives
(Schnegg and Linke 2015). Second, the exercise of agency is shaped by power
dynamics, including the power implicit in the societal allocation of resources
(through governance arrangements), the power adhering to particular social and
political roles, functions and regulations, and the power to challenge boundaries,
or to resist and subvert institutional arrangements (Page 2005; De Koning 2014).
Third, agency is also embedded in routinized practices, and may not be wholly
conscious – practical action is often exercised in taken–for–granted ways, which
people rarely consciously scrutinise. Contemporary practices are located in
social, political and environmental histories and in the rich layering of resource
arrangements, which may provide opportunity or constraint for innovation and
adaptation. It is common for critical institutonal accounts to consider how much
room for manoeuvre different actors have to shape institutions and to promote
change. Here we focus on some key ways in which critical institutional approaches
develop thick models of human agency.
4.1. Agency, rationalities and meaning

The logics of practices matter in understanding how people operate in relation to
institutions (De Koning and Benneker 2013). Things (relationships, resources,
material goods, social order) matter to people beyond their mere instrumental
functionality (Sayer 2011). Such meanings often have emotional, symbolic or
moral dimensions as well as more pragmatic or strategic ones. In securing access
to resources and services, people are also concerned with wider ends (related to
order and meaning, identity and citizenship, wellbeing). This means that practical
arrangements for managing resources are imbued with wider social significance
and can be traced back to the generative principles of the social field (Bourdieu
1977). An example comes from an ecotourism project in Papua New Guinea
accepted by a local community to render an additional income, but also used as a
tool to re-establish traditional power relations among and between communities
and to secure access to alluvial gold mining (De Koning and Benneker 2013).
In critical institutional approaches the model of the individual is highly
relational. Action is only partly the result of conscious strategy and is shaped by
the extent to which a person perceives themselves as autonomous, or inextricably
entwined in a group (Burkitt 2012). Emotions matter when assessing life choices
– they may shape actions of compliance in order to avoid the distress of conflict,
or feelings of anger and indignation may lead to resistance (Page 2005). An
Ecuadorian indigenous community opposed state interference as its historical
relation with the state was characterised by feelings of distrust. Consequently,
forest legislation was met with strong resistance (De Koning 2011).
Understanding people’s actions and the ways these affect institutions goes
further than merely tracking practices and social relationships – there is a need
to uncover meanings, world views, forms of legitimisation and authority – all
aspects which may or may not be visible in public decision making contexts.
Rationality is shaped by belief as well as calculations and both shape social
behaviour, political expectations and understanding of the social order. Crucially
though, worldviews are not necessarily hegemonic and unchanging – they are
perceived, interpreted and drawn on variably by people. Worldviews drawing
on traditional understandings may permeate arrangements dominated by
contemporary globalised economic factors as shown by Boelens (2009). In his
studies of water control in the Andes elements of Andean cosmological beliefs
persist even in the most marketised communities, emerging more strongly in
times of crisis. Such myths and cosmologies can be used to legitimise the actions
of particular interest groups and they are built into everyday behaviour, social
relationships and institutions.
Worldviews or cosmologies provide a way of ordering the social and natural
world, of accommodating unpredictability and of defining proper responses. For
example, the traditional institutional unit for Sami reindeer herders in Norway,
the Siida, incorporates such eco – cosmological perspectives (Sara 2009).
These offer some orderliness in relation to the unpredictabilities of the weather
and environment and shape local discussions and decisions within these units.
Of course this knowledge may not completely align with professional or state
representations of rights and resource management as embodied in legislation,
regulation and bureaucratic institutions. Such moral-ecological understandings
are also the source of symbols and motifs which may be used to legitimise certain
actions, and naturalise institutional and power relationships (Lund 2006).
4.2. Differential capacities, variable practices: power and governance

Agency is linked to power through the capacity to deploy material (allocative) and
non-material (authoritative) resources (Giddens 1984). Such power is exercised
in rule formation in public spaces of decision making but also in the power to
control the agenda (what is discussed, who is represented) and the more invisible
power to shape meaning and ideas about what is acceptable, which occurs in
multiple social spaces (Lukes 2005). CI scholars are often concerned with the
ways in which actors exercise or experience power beyond the public institutions
of decision-making (Funder and Marani 2015). Additional concerns include the
multiple ways in which power is distributed within local organizations; the lack
of power in local institutions; the ways in which new institutions and rules may be
captured by old elites, or new actors (Ribot 2009; Hall et al. 2014).
Poor and marginalized people often find it difficult to shape the formal rules
and the rules in use, to negotiate norms, and experience the costs and benefits
of institutional functioning differently to more powerful people. The costs of
participation may be high and their room for manoeuvre restricted but poor people
are often more dependent on fewer institutions for their resource access and
livelihoods (Agrawal 2005). Cleaver’s study of village water supply in Zimbabwe
shows women related to the dominant village family able to negotiate flexibility
in the rules for using the waterpoint whereas a poor woman resident quickly
pays water fees she can’t afford in order to maintain access and social reputation
(Cleaver 2012).
The variability in the ways that people with different social identities
and resources exercise agency in overlapping institutional spaces requires
disentangling. In Ingram et al’s study of the governance of non-timber forest
products more powerful actors seek to amend statutory arrangements and create
alliances with NGO’s while those with little voice pursue access to land and
water less formally (Ingram et al. 2015). For Verzijl and Dominguez (2015)
multiple identities and overlapping institutional membership may allow actors
to manipulate institutional spaces. Negotiations and struggles occur over natural
resources as material access and rights, but also over meanings and discourses,
representation and participation, as well as individual identities. In a study of the
gendered negotiation of access to land and water in Peru, Delgado and Zwarteveen
(2007) detail differing approaches by women to exercising agency and accessing
resources. Some women work within the boundaries of ‘traditional’ gendered
social water organisation and some challenge these and assert their rights to
participate in more ‘masculine’ domains of official irrigation institutions at some
cost to their own reputation. Delgado and Zwarteveen suggests that the variable
ability to exercise agency through institutions and to challenge boundaries is highly
dependent on the possession of resources (land, knowledge, family networks).
Significant attention has been paid in recent policy and academic literature
to the ways in which actors make ‘practical norms’ of governance. These are the
implicit rules, embedded in practice, which may divert or subvert official or explicit
social rules. Some practical norms are formed strategically and through reflection,
some enacted through a tacit ‘feel for the game’. Recent analyses illustrate the
dynamics between power and pragmatism, in the ways that bureaucrats work
through processes of bricolage. Funder and Marani (2015) document how newly
created district level Environment Officers in Kenya pragmatically piece together
strategies for exercising their role which include cultivating personal networks
and piggy backing on established authority, tailoring informal agreements and
delegating public authority to civil society. Significantly, they need to claim or
create legitimacy for such blended arrangements.
4.3. Physical embodiment, infrastructure and technology

The strong focus in institutional theory and commons scholarship on rule
formation and negotiation necessarily privileges voice as a way of exercising
agency. A critical institutional approach however, might also focus on the ways
in which agency is enacted through physical bodies, and in relation to material
structures and physical phenomena (Arts et al. 2013). Status and power may be
associated with particular forms of dress, demeanour and behaviour, all very
evident in public spaces and the bodily enactment of resource access has symbolic
and political significance (Page 2005). The ability to be negotiating in institutional
spaces and to directly affect the rules- in- use of resource access also depends on
physical presence. It could be argued that able bodiedness is key to the exercise
of agency in participatory natural resource management with poor people in the
Usangu plains in Tanzania often suffering multiple physical constraints on their
ability to produce livelihoods, to travel and to engage socially and institutionally
(Cleaver 2012).
Embodied agency is also exercised in relation to natural resources and
technology. Different forms of technology (such as traditional earth banks or
modern concrete gates in irrigation systems) imply different degrees of control,
by different actors. The unlined field irrigation canals can be easily diverted by
any farmer through the insertion of mud barriers, while ‘improved’ concrete lined
structures require a gate, probably operated by a gatekeeper acting in some official
capacity. Kooij et al. (2015) argue that such infrastructural mechanisms may be
a practical way of dealing with complexities by replacing discussion in public
forum. In this sense infrastructure, rather than institutional arrangements shapes
people’s actual practices and the exercise of agency.
5. Furtherning critical institutionalism

Critical institutional approaches address a number of challenges in institutional
analysis, but in doing so raise more questions. Institutional plurality means that
arrangements for natural resource management are multi-stranded, overlapping

and imbued with a variety of meanings and interests. This plurality raises
questions as to how far processes of bricolage can be managed, and to what extent
institutions elude design? A critical institutional analysis might highlight the fact
that processes of bricolage produce both intended and unintended outcomes,
so leading to questions as to how we judge the success or effectiveness of such
arrangements.
Critical scholars suggest that institutions are formed in the interplay between
the creative exercise of agency and the often constraining effects of social
relationships, environments and the workings of power. This leaves us with the
tricky task of tracking just how much room for manoeuvre specific institutions offer
to different actors, and the extent to which institutions formed through bricolage
can be transformatory. Critical institutional analysis is centrally concerned with
tracking the effects of such arrangements on social justice as well as resource
optimisation. This usefully situates institutional analysis within broader processes
of governance but it also raises questions about where the boundaries of analysis
for natural resource management can be drawn. In embracing plurality and
complexity, how can we produce analyses of complex and dynamic institutional
processes which are broadly legible to policy and public decision making? The
papers in this special issue explore some of these questions and contribute to the
development of critical institutionalism as a school of thought in different ways.3
Several papers in this special issue focus on the multiplicity of dynamic
governance arrangements in the context of natural resources. Marin and
Bjorkland’s paper turns our attention to a commons setting in the global North
(reindeer herding in Norway). Here they seek to address how the Norwegian state
has contributed to the ‘naturalisation’ of the commons and the reinforcement of
the ‘tragedy of the commons’ myth. The authors shed light on the ways in which
customary localised reindeer commons are co-opted into a broad scale formally
institutionalised commons, and the problems which ensue. They draw attention to
complex relations rooted in customary institutions that enable or constrain herders
from accessing resources. They examine how different scholarly institutional
approaches (bargaining, layering and bricolage) can enrich our understanding
the institutional trajectories of resource governance in Norway. This raises
the interesting question as to how far concepts and frameworks from different
disciplines and schools of thought can be effectively combined.
Ingram, Ros-Tonen and Dietz explain the governance arrangements for
non-timber forest products (NTFPs) in Cameroon by exploring the increased
role of NGOs, project-related and market-based organisations in managing and
monitoring forests and creating new institutions such as producer and trade
organizations. They characterise the different products, multiple uses, and plural
governance arrangements of varying intensity as constituting ‘a fine mess’.
3
Most of the papers are drawn from presentations made at a workshop held in London in April 2014
www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/.../institutionalism18-190413.aspx.
Administrative misfits within resource boundaries create room for manoeuvre

through processes of bricolage. Overlaps, voids and coverage of only part of
the value chain with governance arrangements create opportunities for bricolage
by actors – who may for example piece together new arrangements where
governance is of weak intensity and creates livelihood uncertainties. Within
this context, hybrid configurations of customary and statutory regulations have
been created. Such pieced together arrangements may well work by being
exclusive and so the impacts of sustainable livelihoods are more difficult to
capture. Rather than just describing the fine mess, the authors suggest a scoring
method for measuring the strength and intensity of different configurations of
plural governance arrangements. For this they draw on some of the mainstream
institutional design principles, and incorporate additional indicators such as
legitimacy. They conclude that arrangements pieced together through bricolage
have the potential to create win-win situations in which both conservation and
development aims are met. However, the intricate constellations and interactions
in chains can make outcomes difficult to predict.
In his article on financing and delivery of water services in Mali, Jones also
examines institutional and governance arrangements across scales. His paper
is concerned with the governance of public goods (community water supplies)
and his analysis draws on three areas of work which he sees as interlinked;
political economy analysis, practical hybridity and institutional bricolage. Jones’
paper responds to Cleaver’s (2012) call to place detailed local-level analysis
of institutional change within a broader framework which bridges different
scales, considers the role of external actors and wider structural factors, and is
“legible” to policymakers. Jones suggests that his analysis brings mainstream
and critical institutionalism and analysis of the wider structures, institutions
and actors shaping local governance arrangements, into engagement. Crucially,
his paper addresses the question of whether the outcomes of hybrid and pieced
together arrangements can be seen as merely palliative or more constructive and
transformational.
A number of studies deploying the concept of institutional bricolage have
focussed on community level arrangements and the ways in which local actors
exercise agency. In their paper Funder and Marani shift this focus to the interface
between state and community where frontline bureaucrats (in this case Kenyan
district level Environment Officers) act as bricoleurs, deploying inventive
practices to ‘get the job done’. The authors set these actions in a constantly
changing institutional environment (shaped by the growth of community
based organisations and reorientation of national policies) and show how the
Environment Officers must navigate their way through a complex and multi-
layered institutional landscape. They do this through bricolage, but to be effective
they must claim or create legitimacy and authority for the blended arrangements.
Environment Officers see these as efforts to get the job done, and making the
state function in the context of limited reach and authority, only partially fitting
neopatrimonial analyses of how states operate in Africa. Funder and Marani’s
paper highlights the patchiness and variability of bricolaged arrangements.

Formal forest regulations for one area proved difficult to negotiate or blend
because maintaining they were symbolically important for Forest Officers and
of national political interest.
The case of the Water Users Association in the Peruvian Andres by Verzijl
and Dominguez explains how a water association, despite not realizing its water
management tasks and not being effective on paper, is still a durable and influential
institution. By referring to the multiple identities and realities of the Peruvian
communities, this institution is serving many locally relevant purposes and
functions while at the same time operating under the flag of “good governance”.
This creates a locally acceptable working of the association that ensures its
survival. This paper problematizes the link between institutional effectiveness
and durability.
A somewhat different angle on critical institutionalism is used in the paper
written by Kooij, Zwarteveen and Kuper. They describe a farmer-managed
irrigation system in Northwest Morocco and explore the social dimensions of
technological innovations in irrigation systems. They suggest that technologies
(in this case the mechanisms of gates in irrigation canals) are key players in the
management of common pool resources and we should see such governance
arrangements as socio-technical systems and not over-focus on the formation of
rules made by human actors. In this case the members of water users associations
have a strong desire to maintain social harmony and keep the irrigation system
running. Instead of openly addressing conflicts and differences of interest, human
actors propose new technologies. This allows them to enact changes in a manner
which seem less conflictual, though technologies make certain human decisions
and actions possible and others not, so are in fact, highly political.
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URL:http://www.thecommonsjournal.org
DOI: 10.18352/ijc.848
Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN: 1875-0281
The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD)

Framework
Luke Whaley
Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, UK
l.whaley@sheffield.ac.uk
Abstract: In recent years, ‘critical institutionalism’ has emerged as a school of

thought in its own right. Among its strengths is a focus on institutions as both
complex and embedded, where institutional change is understood as a process
of bricolage. Yet a number of distinct challenges follow from this. These include
capturing the ‘complex-embeddedness’ of institutions; making critical institution-
alism amendable to the world of policy; investigating the more hidden, informal,
and everyday dimensions of institutional life; and providing explanations of com-
mons governance that foreground the workings of power and meaning. In this
paper, I provide an outline of the Critical Institutional Analysis and Development
(CIAD) Framework, designed to explicitly reflect the basic tenets and core claims
of critical institutionalism. Whilst it shares similarities with its predecessors – the
IAD Framework (Ostrom 1990, 2005) and ‘politicised’ IAD Framework (Clement
2010) – the modifications it has undergone results in a qualitatively different
framework geared toward critical institutional research. The paper considers
ways in which the CIAD Framework facilitates systematic and critical analyses
of commons governance whilst addressing key challenges a critical institutional
approach engenders.
Keywords: Critical Institutionalism, Governance, IAD framework, methodo

logy, power and meaning, structure and agency
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for

their generous and constructive comments. This work has been undertaken as part
of the Hidden Crisis Consortium research project – part of a seven year interna-
tional research programme (UPGro) focusing on improving the evidence base
around groundwater availability and management in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA),
and jointly funded by UK’s Department for International Development (DFID),
2 Luke Whaley
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC).
1. Introduction
Much of commons scholarship after Hardin (1968) has been accompanied by an
attempt to develop a framework for analysing institutions for commons gover-
nance. This endeavour was pursued in particular by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues
and resulted in the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework
(Kiser and Ostrom 1982; Ostrom 1990, 2005; Blomquist and DeLeon 2011;
McGinnis 2011). Over the same period, scholars working in disciplines including
anthropology, sociology, and development studies were infusing commons schol-
arship with a different set of concepts and ideas. In part, these efforts have served
as a critique of several of the core assumptions and suppositions that have char-
acterised much work on the commons (e.g. Goldman 1997; Mosse 1997; Cleaver
2000, 2002; Johnson 2004; Nightingale 2011; Saunders 2014; Schnegg 2016).
Cleaver (2012) has termed this second school of thought ‘critical institutionalism’
in contrast to the other school of thought, typified by the work of Ostrom, which
she has calls ‘mainstream institutionalism’.
Whilst a clear agenda to develop a framework has accompanied the evolution
of mainstream institutionalism, the same cannot be said for critical institutional-
ism. In part, this relates to the difficulty of developing a framework that reflects
the basic tenets and core concerns of the school. This includes the challenge of
capturing the ways in which commons governance arrangements are embedded
in historically specific social relations and ecological conditions, where power
and culture is paramount to explaining their workings. Furthermore, it is likely
that the development of a ‘multi-purpose diagnostic framework’ is less appeal-
ing to critical institutionalists, who tend to stress plural epistemologies, a degree
of indeterminism, and the contingent nature of knowledge claims. Despite this, I
argue that there is value in developing a framework for critical institutionalists.
In particular, it has utility as an ‘organising principle’ that helps to structure criti-
cal and systematic analyses of commons governance arrangements, alerting the
analyst to a range of relevant questions, methods, and dynamics. This may prove
especially useful for less experienced researchers.
In this article, I outline the Critical Institutional Analysis and Development
(CIAD) Framework. Building on Clement’s (2010) ‘politicised’ IAD Framework,
the CIAD Framework reflects the theoretical and conceptual insights that under-
pin critical institutionalism. In what follows, I discuss how the CIAD Framework
is grounded in a critical realist philosophy, charting a middle ground between
structure and agency to draw attention to the key features of social situations
and their outcomes. At the same time, I consider the ways in which the CIAD
Framework may help to address several of the main challenges faced by criti-
cal Institutionalism. These challenges relate to: 1) the ‘complex-embeddedness’
of institutions, 2) making critical institutional research amenable to the world
The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) Framework 3
of policy, 3) investigating the more hidden, informal, and everyday dimensions

of institutional life, and 4) providing explanations of commons governance that
foreground the workings of power and meaning. Given the disciplinary breadth of
the different scholars who make up critical institutionalism, the CIAD Framework
proposed here is of course open to a range of critiques and revisions; a point I
welcome in concluding the article.
2. Critical institutionalism

More recently there have been several efforts to delineate and articulate critical
institutionalism as a school of thought in its own right (Cleaver 2012; Hall et al.
2014; Cleaver and de Koning 2015). Here I shall not undertake yet another expo-
sition. Instead, it suffices to provide a short overview of critical institutionalism
and to bring attention to a number of key challenges it faces. I start with the cen-
tral premise that critical institutionalism conceives of institutions as both complex
and embedded. This ‘complex-embeddedness’ (Peters 1987) stems from the fact
that institutions are situated within particular political and economic structures.
Furthermore, they always enmesh with and emerge out of people’s systems of
meaning and culturally accepted ways of doing things. As a result, institutions
tend to reflect, and often entrench, historically specific power relations (Mosse
1997). Where attempts are made to create or impose new institutions, this is never
undertaken upon a ‘blank slate’ but instead must contend with these existing
social relations and cultural paradigms, often leading to outcomes that are both
unintended and unexpected (de Koning 2011).
A good deal of mainstream institutional thinking focuses on the public spaces
that undeniably represent an important part of institutional life (whether formal or
informal). This same thinking proposes that institutions for governing the com-
mons are created or modified by individuals through processes of deliberative
‘crafting’ or ‘design’ (Feeny et al. 1990; Schlager and Ostrom 1992; Pomeroy and
Berkes 1997; Ostrom 1999; Dietz et al. 2002). On the other hand, critical institu-
tionalism extends this framing to incorporate the ways in which institutions are
entwined in people’s everyday practices, and emerge and evolve through dynamic
processes of ‘institutional bricolage’ (Douglas 1986; Cleaver 2001, 2002).
Institutional bricolage is a concept that attempts to capture the ways in which
people both consciously and non-consciously patch together institutional arrange-
ments from the social and cultural resources available to them. Elaborating on the
concept, Cleaver (2012, 34) writes that by “imbu[ing] configurations of rules, tra-
ditions, norms, and relationships with meaning and authority…people modify old
arrangements and invent new ones.” Furthermore, “innovations are always linked
authoritatively to acceptable ways of doing things” where “these refurbishments
are everyday responses to changing circumstances” (ibid).
Critical institutionalism therefore draws attention to the messy complexity of
institutional life, ingrained in everyday practices and imbued with power relations
and cultural meaning. Institutions formed through bricolage are characteristically
4 Luke Whaley
plural in their functioning, where arrangements that purportedly serve one pur-
pose are adapted to serve others as circumstances dictate (Cleaver 2007; Jones
2015; Schnegg and Linke 2015). This also implies a degree of indeterminacy,
overlap, and potential contestation when it comes to the functional remit across
different institutions (for example, in the case of claims by different state and
non-state institutions to wield public authority in a given sphere of social life
[Lund 2006]). Furthermore, institutions seldom perform consistently over time
but instead operate intermittently in relation to changing conditions (Berry 1994;
Smith et al. 2001).
2.1. Some challenges

The complex-embeddedness of institutions poses a number of challenges for
scholars working within a critical institutional tradition. Here I mention several
of the more pressing concerns. Not least among them is the difficulty of inform-
ing policy (Mosse 2006; Cleaver and Franks 2008). Critical institutional research
often results in rich descriptions or explanations of particular contexts and situ-
ations. Yet this begs the question, how can this specificity and complexity be
translated or represented in such a way that it has purchase for public decision-
making? What might make critical institutional research more amenable to policy
makers whilst maintaining the integrity of the research itself?
Another challenge concerns the domains and scales within and across which
critical institutional scholars seek answers to the question of the commons.
Rather than focusing only on the more tangible aspects of commons governance
arrangements, critical institutionalists concern themselves with those places and
spaces wherein norms and values that underpin said arrangements are typically
nurtured, reinforced, or negotiated. There is, therefore, an interest in apparently
non-relevant associational activities such as weddings and funerals, public meet-
ings, clubs, pubs, and any other customary and enculturated forms of social inter-
action (Nightingale 2011; Cleaver 2012). Furthermore, there is a concomitant
requirement to understand how wider systems of governance and historical pro-
cesses come to bear on the functioning or operation of more local governance
arrangements (Mollinga 2008; Merrey and Cook 2012; Saunders 2014; Jones
2015; Whaley and Cleaver 2017). This draws attention to the workings of broader
power structures and temporally situated social dynamics.
A final challenge following on from above concerns critical institutional-
ism’s tendency to foreground power and meaning as constitutive features of all
governance arrangements. The theoretical diversity that accompanies this stance
suggests a potential methodological quagmire. Critical institutional analyses of
power and meaning – or ‘politics’ and ‘culture’ in their broadest senses – differ
considerably in approach. Nonetheless, it is generally recognised that research
should attempt to capture not only visible and even hidden forms of power (where
the latter concerns attempts at ‘agenda setting’). Instead, it is also necessary to
understand the seemingly invisible ways in which power operates through, for
example, the prevalence of particular discourses and the tacit cognitive schemes
that order thought, feeling, perception, and action (cf. Lukes 1974; Bourdieu
1977; Foucault 1978; Hayward 2000, 2004).
3. The CIAD Framework

The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) framework
(Figure 1) facilitates research into commons governance that explicitly attempts
to align with the claims and objectives of critical institutionalism. A central con-
cern is the need to critically and systematically analyse the ‘complex-embedded-
ness’ of institutions. As with its predecessors, the CIAD Framework helps to order
a research agenda by bringing attention to the relevant aspects of the situations of
interest and the types of questions one may want to ask. In doing so, it facilitates
a nuanced analysis of the relationship between structure, agency, and social situa-
tion. The result is an approach that foregrounds power and meaning to understand
commons governance arrangements, and which reveals the workings of institu-
tional change as processes of bricolage.
Figure 1: The CIAD Framework.
The CIAD Framework has been adapted from the original IAD Framework
(Ostrom 1990, 2005) and a further iteration, the ‘politicised’ IAD Framework
(Clement 2010). Whilst it shares clear similarities with these previous versions,
the modifications it has undergone results in a qualitatively different framework
geared toward critical institutional research. From the outset, it should be recog-
nised that the CIAD Framework dispenses with the game theoretic underpinning
of Ostrom’s original IAD Framework. It therefore does not function as a tool to
rigidly and reductively model decision making between individuals and groups
in any definitive sense. Rather, it is a heuristic device that is suggestive of the
questions, methods, dynamics, and relationships that facilitate a systematic and
critical analysis of commons governance arrangements and the ways in which
they change over time.
6 Luke Whaley
3.1. Philosophical foundation: critical realism

Critical realism (Bhaskar 1979; Archer 1995; Danermark et al. 2002) is a philoso-
phy of social science that has come to be associated with critical institutionalism
(Cleaver 2012). I restrict the discussion in this sub-section to locating the CIAD
Framework in a critical realist paradigm by pointing to how it usefully attends to
one of the philosophy’s key ontological claims. This claim concerns the relation-
ship between structure and agency, and a related methodological challenge.
Unlike rival structuralist and voluntarist paradigms, critical realism proposes
that social structure and human agency are recursively implicated in the ongoing
reproduction and transformation of social systems (signified in Figure 1 by the
text in the large arrow leading from rules and resources to the social situation).
This position aligns with Giddens’s ‘structuration’ theory, whereby “the rules and
resources that are drawn upon in the production and reproduction of social action
are at the same time the means of system reproduction” (Giddens 1984, 19).
However, the two positions also differ in one important way. Whilst both Giddens
and proponents of critical realism promote the idea of a recursive relationship
between structure and agency, critical realists have criticised Giddens’s notion of
the ‘duality of structure’ for being atemporal and synchronic, failing to provide
an analytic distinction between structure and agency and therefore collapsing into
indeterminacy1 (Archer 1995).
Archer (1995) instead argues for what she calls ‘analytical dualism’ whereby
the ongoing sequence recursively implicating structure and agency is broken up
analytically into three stages. She terms these three stages ‘Emergence-Interplay-
Outcome’. Emergence is a key concept for critical realists, and here refers to
the phenomenon whereby structure (represented by the rules and resources cat-
egories of the CIAD Framework) emerge from people’s practices, interactions,
and other actions whilst at the same time not being reducible to them (Bhaskar
1979; Elder-Vass 2010). These emergent structures are typically unintended. As
Bhaskar (1979, 38) argues:
“[P]eople, in their conscious activity, for the most part unconsciously repro-
duce (and occasionally transform) the structures governing their substantive
activities of production. Thus people do not marry to reproduce the nuclear
family or work to sustain the capitalist economy. Yet it is nevertheless the
unintended consequence (and inexorable result) of, as it is also a necessary
condition for, their activity. Moreover, when social forms change, the expla-
nation will not normally lie in the desires of agents to change them that way,
though as a very important theoretical and political limit it may do so”
The composition of the CIAD Framework in Figure 1 reflects the various points
raised in this section. Archer’s triad of Emergence-Interplay-Outcome is captured
by the Framework’s emergent rules and resources, the interplay between these
1
Archer (1995, 2007) calls this ‘central conflation’.
rules and resources as they are drawn on by participants interacting in the social
situation, and the outcomes that result. The Framework also captures how the
outcomes of these situations (the intended and unintended consequences) feed
back into the rules and resources through a process of emergence. These rules and
resources then serve as the conditions for future behaviour. The CIAD Framework
therefore attends to critical realism’s ontological claim concerning the relation-
ship between structure, agency, and emergence, and provides a means of analys-
ing this dynamic by differentiating between rules and resources, social situation,
outcomes, and the interplay between them.
3.2. The rules and resources

The first part of the CIAD Framework is the rules and resources component.
This term borrows from Giddens (1984) and represents the structural features
of the natural and social world most pertinent to critical analyses of institutions.
However, as purely structural features, rules and resources are essentially ‘out
of time and space’ and marked by an ‘absence of the subject’ (ibid). Later, I will
consider the ways in which the CIAD Framework helps the analyst to examine
how rules and resources are recursively implicated in the reproduction of social
systems as knowledgeable human actors draw upon them in the social situation.
At this stage, it suffices to say that rules and resources are both the medium and
outcome of human actions, as Figure 1 suggests.
In the CIAD Framework, the rules and resources comprise five distinct but
interrelated categories. These are the biophysical and material world, the political
economy, social attributes, discourse, and rules and norms. These categories are
suggestive of particular types of analysis. For example, forms of political econ-
omy or discourse analysis. Unlike in the original IAD Framework, where each of
the three exogenous variables are contained within discrete boxes, in the CIAD
Framework the five categories are partitioned by dotted lines. This modification
is suggestive of the interrelationships between them: that the categories interpen-
etrate and do not succumb easily to treatment in isolation. For example, many
‘social attributes’ (e.g. gender, race, class) share some relationship with the ‘bio-
physical and material’ (e.g. sex, skin pigmentation, clothing/dress); the meanings
that constitute particular ‘social attributes’ are constructed within ‘discourse’; and
‘discourse’ and ‘rules and norms’ are often closely related, not least when it comes
to understanding institutions2 (Hajer 1995; Phillips et al. 2004; Dryzek 2005).
Among other things, the ‘co-action’ (Clement 2010) of the rules and norms cat-
egory with the other four categories underlines the embeddedness of institutions.
Turning to consider the categories in order. Firstly, the biophysical and mate-
rial category encompasses the nature of the resource, resources, or ecosystem
2
Dryzek (2005, 20) observes that certain discourses become interwoven with institutions, where
they “constitute the informal understandings that provide the context for social interaction, on a par
with formal institutional rules.”
8 Luke Whaley
in question. Here mainstream institutional insights linking particular resource

characteristics – including excludability, subtractability, stationarity, and storage
– to the possibility or likelihood of collective action is useful (see Ostrom et al.
1994). This category also relates to forms of technology, infrastructure, and the
broader physical landscape, as well as to physiological attributes of actors in the
social situation. For critical institutionalists, a point of interest concerns the ways
in which the biophysical and material is co-constituted in dynamic relationship
with ‘the social’ (Mosse 1997; Cleaver 2012; Whaley and Cleaver 2017). The
CIAD Framework helps to articulate this dynamic in two ways. Firstly, through
the co-action of the biophysical and material category with the other four social
categories of the rules and resources component. Secondly, through the interplay
between the biophysical and material category and the social situation.
Clement (2010) added the political economy category to the original IAD
Framework, providing explicit consideration of power and interests. This cate-
gory draws the analyst’s attention to social dynamics that “require one’s analysis
to expand outward to take account of the wider political and economic factors that
directly or indirectly influence the behaviour of participants in the [social] situa-
tion” (Whaley and Weatherhead 2014, 14). At the same time, it encourages one’s
analysis to “expand backward in time so as to understand the events and processes
that have given rise to present-day conditions” (ibid). A broad political economy
framing therefore addresses concerns of power, scale, and history shared by many
critical institutionalists and helps to delineate the ‘room for manoeuvre’ (Long
2001) of actors at different levels. In doing so, it sheds light on the general limits
or ‘corridors’ (Sehring 2009) within which institutional change may occur. When
analysing more local contexts and micro-level interactions, the political economy
category also points to analyses of the ‘everyday political economy’ (Elias and
Rethel 2016) of people’s lifeworlds by focusing on the power dynamics, interests,
and quotidian practices of actors in these social situations.
The ‘social attributes’ category relates to such things as race, gender, class,
caste, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, kinship status, and wealth. To this extent,
it brings explicit attention to social structure and the relevance of different struc-
tural dimensions for a given context. For example, a consideration of how gender
structures a social situation may reveal the workings of a patriarchal structure.
The analyst may observe that only men participate in the situation of interest
or occupy certain positions, or they may observe that one or more of the prac-
tices typically associated with a position may not be available to the participant
in question if they are a woman. On the other hand, consideration of class may
reveal how a capitalist class structure comes to bear on a given situation where
likewise only people of a certain class participate in it or occupy certain positions.
Moreover, understanding why some participants in a social situation are able to
bend or break rules without suffering punitive measures often comes down to
identifying social attributes of these sorts.
As with the political economy category, Clement (2010) also added a ‘dis-
course’ variable to develop her ‘politicised’ IAD Framework, and which remains
as part of the CIAD Framework. The discourse category brings explicit attention
to the semiotic dimension of social life. It is a way of examining meaning, ratio-
nalities, representations, and types of knowledge, enabling forms of commons
research that recognise that struggles over resources are also struggles over mean-
ing (Li 1996). Discourse analysis is a broad field that facilitates critical analyses
of power and meaning and is therefore of much interest to critical institutionalists.
Finally, the ‘rules and norms’ category modifies the original ‘rules’ variable
of the IAD Framework. Firstly, the change signals that for critical intuitionalists
an understanding of institutions inevitably incorporates not only rules but also
people’s norms of behaviour.3 Ostrom (2005, 18) defines rules as “enforced pre-
scriptions concerning what actions (or outcomes) are required, prohibited, or per-
mitted.” Whilst this definition of rules is useful, for many critical institutionalists
it may be too restrictive. Instead, critical institutionalism typically employs more
sociologically informed ideas about rule taxonomies and definitions.4 This raises
a second point concerning the inclusion of ‘norms’ in this category. As Hodgson
(2006, 6) observes, “a hard and fast distinction between rules and norms is often
difficult to maintain.” Indeed, a distinction between rules, norms, and practices
brings with it inevitable ‘grey areas’. Whilst mainstream institutionalism often
attempts to reduce or eliminate this indeterminacy, critical institutionalism instead
accepts the existence of these grey areas as an inevitable aspect of research into
the complex and ‘messy’ world of institutions, dynamically embedded in social
and material relations.
3.3. The social situation: field, domain, and arena

The five rules and resources categories comprise the medium available for partici-
pants to draw upon in the second part of the Framework, namely the social situation
(Figure 2). The social situation replaces the IAD Framework’s ‘action situation’.
In part, this is to take attention away from the idea that what is of concern for
critical institutionalists is only ‘action’ or ‘behaviour’. Instead, critical institution-
alism is also concerned with the hidden and even invisible5 aspects of the social
world, including the ‘shadowy places’ institutions cast and which oftentimes con-
3
Ostrom (2005) also pays close attention to norms. However, for her the necessity to include norms
as part of an institutional analysis is not always clear. Instead, I contend that critical institutionalism
is far clearer about the fact that norms are a crucial aspect of institutional analysis.
4
Crawford and Ostrom (2005) produce their own taxonomy – the ADICO syntax – designed to
systematically differentiate between rules, norms, and strategies. Despite the clarity of their system,
and as noted in the main text, in practice distinguishing between rules and norms is not always easy.
One way in which mainstream institutionalism attempts to produce this clarity is by employing a
very definite and somewhat restricted definition of rules. Here the focus is “primarily on short-term
payoffs,” where rules are “linguistic statements containing prescriptions similar to norms, but [that
also] carry an additional, assigned sanction if forbidden actions are taken and observed by a monitor”
(Ostrom and Basurto 2010, 322).
5
See Lukes (1974) for his discussion of hidden and invisible, or ‘two-dimensional’ and ‘three-di-
mensional’, power.
10 Luke Whaley
ceal the everyday workings of power (Douglas 1986).6 The term also responds to
McCay’s (2002) call for commons scholars to pay greater attention to what she
calls ‘situation’, including how rules and property rights emerge from within par-
ticular historical, ecological, and cultural traditions. McCay (2002, 393) argues
that explaining how people relate to each other and their environment “requires
specification of those traditions and their broader context.” These are concerns the
CIAD Framework deals with explicitly by examining the relationship between
rules and resources and the elements of the social situation (see below).
Figure 2: The Social Situation.
The social situation represents the social space of interest to the analyst. In the
CIAD Framework it is bordered by a dotted line, suggesting both the porosity or
semi-autonomous nature of most situations (Moore 1978) and their relative inde-
terminacy, with the corollary that they tend to elude precise definition. Following
Long (2001), the social situation can be any one of three qualitatively different
types. These are the field, domain, or arena. These three types of social situation
do not correspond to the nested ‘operational’, ‘collective-choice’, and ‘constitu-
tional’ levels of governance associated with the original IAD Framework. Whilst
the latter concepts refer to ‘deeper’ levels of rule following and rule-changing situ-
ation, fields, domains, and arenas instead help the analyst to identify qualitatively
different (although often interlocking or interpenetrating) types of social situation
based on their relative internal coherence and cohesiveness. As Long (2001, 57)
observes, “all three concepts address the issue of the bounding of social spaces
and how they are constituted and transformed.”
With this in mind, a ‘field’ tends to be large and lacking a single organising
principle. It will often be the broadest analytical boundary, within which different
domains and arenas are considered. Examples may be a geographical area per-
taining to a region, river catchment, or biome. Next, the ‘domain’ relates to those
6
This position is captured by the mantra that “what you see is usually not what you get” (De Herdt
and Olivier De Sardan 2015, 2).
situations typified by a degree of commonality: a core or cluster of rules, norms,

discourses, and values engendering a degree of social commitment among partici-
pants. From the myriad potential social situations that could count as a domain,
of much interest to commons scholars has been the local governance arrange-
ments in place for the management, access, and use of common pool resources.
Finally, ‘arenas’ are situations characterised by confrontation, contestation, and
difference, often located at the interface between actors’ various lifeworlds or
distinct ‘spheres of existence’. An example would be the interface between local
communities and district-level extension workers. Whilst arenas reveal sites of
difference and contestation they typically also reveal the boundaries and shared
expectations that have developed in order to mediate between participants in dif-
ferent positions. Furthermore, domains may be replete with their own arenas –
points of confrontation, negotiation, and difference – that become apparent as the
analyst moves in to consider the internal dynamics of the situation. This reveals a
notable strength of the CIAD Framework in that it permits movement within and
across scales of organisation and levels of abstraction, in accordance with one’s
research agenda.
3.4. The social situation: structure, agency, and system

All social situations share the same internal composition of nine distinct elements
(Figure 2). Broadly speaking, these elements can be divided into two groups. The
first group comprises the three ‘systemic elements’ of participants, positions, and
practices, and the second the six ‘agential elements’ of goals and objectives, capa-
bility, knowledge, values, emotions, and strategies and tactics. When these ele-
ments are considered in relation to each other and to the five rules and resources
categories, they draw the analyst’s attention to questions of structure and agency
within specific social contexts. Here I will consider the social situation’s systemic
and agential elements in turn, as well as their interplay with the rules and resources
categories. I draw in particular on the social theory of Giddens (1984).
As mentioned above and following Giddens, the rules and resources catego-
ries that structure situations are in a sense ‘out of time and space’ and marked by
an ‘absence of the subject’. In contrast to this, Giddens (1984, 25) argues that
“the social systems in which structure is recursively implicated…comprise the
situated activities of human agents, reproduced across time and space” (Giddens
1984, 25). This understanding of how structure and agency combine in particular
situations to produce social systems points to the appropriateness of the use of the
term ‘systemic’ to describe the participant, position, and practices elements. This
is because social systems are “relations between actors or collectivities, organised
as regular social practices” (Giddens 1984, 25). Reinterpreting this last point in
light of the three systemic elements, we can say that social systems comprise
individual or collective actors (the participants), the relationships between these
actors (understood as a property of their respective positions), and their regular
social practices.
12 Luke Whaley
The systemic elements therefore require the analyst to identify who partici-
pates in the social situation of interest, their respective positions – such as water
users, Water Point Committee members, village chief, or District Water Officer
– and the identifiable set of practices that are typically associated with these posi-
tions. For example, practices associated with a water user could include collect-
ing water (e.g. walking to the water point, queuing, pumping, and carrying the
water home); cleaning the water point and its surroundings; paying user fees; and
attending gatherings to discuss water-related issues, decide on rules of access and
use, or to vote in members of the Water Point Committee.
In keeping with critical institutionalism, people’s practices – and not indi-
viduated actions – therefore become key to understanding institutional func-
tioning and development. A practice can be thought of as “a routinized type of
behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms
of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a back-
ground knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion
and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002, 248–249). In effect, practices are
the lynchpin that bind structure and agency in time and space to produce recog-
nisable social systems. All commons governance arrangements are comprised
of participants in different positions engaging in a spectrum of routinized and
exploratory practices. Whilst practices provide governance arrangements with
their systemic form, they must also be understood as conduits through which a
good deal of human agency is exercised. Crucially then, for critical institutional-
ists agency is not simply a form of conscious and deliberative thought or action.
Instead, agency is also, and often, less-consciously or non-consciously exercised
by people engaged in their various social practices, informed by what Bourdieu
(1990) called a ‘feel for the game’.
Understanding agency therefore requires conceiving of the ways in which
habitualised and creative forms of behaviour co-exist (Cleaver 2012). Drawing
on insights from social theory, in the social situation agency is captured by six
agential elements, namely goals and objectives, capability, knowledge, values,
emotions, and strategies and tactics. As compared to Ostrom’s (2005) action
arena, here the ‘information’ element has been replaced by the ‘knowledge’ ele-
ment, and the ‘control’ element by the ‘capability’ element. These two modified
elements are still able to perform the same functions as before,7 however the
new terminology expressly relates to what Giddens (1984) claims are the basic
characteristics of human agency, namely ‘knowledgeability’ and ‘capability’.8
The knowledge element may be unpacked in various ways. So, for example, into
7
That is, ‘knowledge’ can still imply ‘information’, and ‘capability’ can still infer a capacity to
exercise ‘control’.
8
‘Knowledgeability’ concerns reflexive self-monitoring, the monitoring of others, and a general
awareness of situation – “The monitored character of the ongoing flow of social life” (Giddens
1984, 3) – whilst ‘capability’ concerns a capacity “to command relevant skills, access to material and
non-material resources and engage in particular organising practices” (Long 2001, 49).
forms of information, understanding, and belief.9 The capability element relates

to an actor’s skills and competencies, their ability to access and mobilise rules and
resources, and to engage in particular organising practices.
The addition of an emotions element to the social situation brings explicit
attention to how people’s feelings, fundamentally rooted in a need for ontological
security, motivate them to behave in particular ways. When combined with the
knowledge and capability elements, human actors are understood to be ‘knowing/
feeling active subjects’ (Long 2001, 20). The addition of a values element pro-
vides further nuance to understanding agency and replaces the more economically
reductive concept of ‘costs and benefits’ used by Ostrom and others in the original
IAD Framework. Instead, this element requires the analyst to consider partici-
pants’ broader notions of worth and usefulness as they relate to things, events,
processes, and outcomes. Values do not only capture perceived payoffs of poten-
tial outcomes but also principles or standards of behaviour and what is considered
important in life.
The four agential elements discussed so far – capability, knowledge, values,
and emotions – inform a participant’s goals and objectives, as indicated by the
unidirectional arrows in the social situation (Figure 2). Together these goals and
objectives help the analyst to understand the interests of different participants
and their motivation for acting in certain ways and toward particular ends. Here
‘goals’ refer to the long-term aims held by participants and tend to be relatively
broad and abstract. In a sense, they relate to an actor’s life project or projects,
although these will always be subject to change. On the other hand, ‘objectives’
are more short-term and concrete. However, as indicated in Figure 2, goals and
objectives emerge not only in relation to the four agential elements just discussed
but also in relation to the positions of participants in the social situation. These
positions typically relate to inclusion of the participant in particular social institu-
tions or organisations, inferring that the goals and objectives of the participant
will oftentimes overlap with the goals and objectives of the institution or organ-
isation. Unlike the other five agential elements, the goals and objectives element
is not directly structured by rules and resources but only indirectly in a pivotal
relationship with all the other elements in the social situation.
Goals and objectives both inform and are informed by the last of the six agen-
tial elements, namely strategies and tactics. As noted above, the CIAD Framework
understands agency as typically exercised through practices, and with varying
degrees of conscious awareness. Here I draw upon de Certeau (1984) to argue that
when people engage in practices we can think of them as doing so either strategi-
cally or tactically. For de Certeau (1984), ‘strategies’ are conceived of and imple-
mented by more powerful actors – the ‘producers’ (rulers, authorities, etc.) – and
are attempts to rationalise space and exert forms of control over it. On the other
hand, ‘tactics’ describe the ways in which ‘consumers’ of these spaces ‘poach’
And, more theoretically, into ‘embodied’, ‘practical’, and ‘discursive’ knowledge (Archer, 2000).
9
14 Luke Whaley
on existing rules and structures. They are the forms of ‘necessary improvisation’
undertaken by the less powerful – the ‘dominated masses’ – as they negotiate
the exigencies of everyday life.10 Tactics function as “internal manipulations of
a system…of established order” (de Certeau 1984, 29). Differentiating between
strategies and tactics is therefore a useful way of thinking about agency and power
in the social situation. This includes attempts by more powerful actors to exert
control (strategically) and less powerful actors to manoeuver within limits (tacti-
cally). It also helps to articulate aspects of institutional emergence or change,11 as
well as imposition.12
3.5. A note on power and meaning

Power and meaning have long and variegated histories in the social sciences.
Here I will briefly consider one way in which the CIAD Framework functions
to explore these concepts through its focus on the recursive relationship between
structure and agency. Whilst the approach taken here is certainly not exhaustive, it
does provide a useful means for thinking about and analysing power and meaning
using the CIAD Framework.
For Giddens (1984), the ability to exercise agency relates to the capability to do
things, which necessarily infers power. However, as agency and structure are inter-
dependent, understanding the ability of different participants to exercise power in
the social situation requires an understanding of the structural resources available
to them: “resources are media through which power is exercised, as a routine ele-
ment of the instantiation of conduct in social reproduction” (Giddens 1984, 16).
Giddens distinguishes between allocative and authoritative resources. Allocative
resources refer to “material resources involved in the generation of power, includ-
ing the natural environment and physical artefacts” (Giddens 1984, 373). On the
other hand, authoritative resources refer to “non-material resources involved in the
generation of power” (ibid, 373) and include discourses, policies, rules, relation-
ships, concepts, and ideas. Here non-material resources in particular are represen-
tative of the meaning (or semiotic) dimension of social structure.
Returning to the CIAD Framework, it is apparent that these material and non-
material resources are well captured by the various categories of the rules and
resources component. Their relevance for thinking about differentials in power
among participants results from their interplay with the various systemic and
agential elements in a social situation. In effect, the rules and resources relevant
to a given social situation will position different participants differently in that
situation. Depending on their positions, participants will have differing access to
10
Moore (1978) makes a similar distinction when she talks about processes of ‘regularisation’ and
processes of ‘situational adjustment’.
11
As a rational project of ‘crafting’ or ‘building’, on the one hand; or, on the other, through the
“gradual erosion and displacement” (de Certeau 1984, 34) of institutions from ‘within’.
12
For example, through state or NGO-led attempts to ‘induce’ community-based management pro-
grammes by forming village-level committees, user associations, and the like.
and capability to draw upon the rules and resources in the course of (consciously
or non-consciously) attempting to achieve particular goals and objectives. This in
turn reflects their differing abilities to exercise agency, and thus power.
3.6. Evaluating interactions and outcomes

A range of criteria can be used to evaluate both interactions and outcomes in the
CIAD Framework. From a critical institutional perspective, a key evaluative cri-
terion is social justice. Social justice applies to interactions in the social situation
through procedural and interactional justice concerns and to the outcomes com-
ponent through a distributive justice lens. Of course, this is not to say that there
are no other evaluative criteria of importance to critical institutionalists. Among
them, we may point to the transaction costs of different interactional settings
(information, coordination, and strategic costs), and to other overall performance
categories, including sustainability, resilience, or efficiency.
Furthermore, the CIAD Framework accommodates the possibility that more
than one person may participate in an evaluation process, and often through
recourse to including the research participants themselves. As a result, a dotted
line bounds the evaluation box, indicating that it too may be a semi-autonomous
social situation (in this case a domain, or even an arena). The two-way arrow
between the evaluation box and the social situation indicates that not only are
evaluation criteria applied to social situations but also that the participants in these
situations can contribute to the evaluation process itself. This may be particularly
important for some critical institutionalists for whom the validity and integrity of
their claims about a social dynamic under investigation requires the views of the
people who themselves make up that dynamic.
As a minimum, forms of participatory evaluation may help to produce claims
that do not grossly misrepresent the people and issues in question. However, treat-
ing participatory evaluation processes as social situations also highlights the sorts
of relations and interactions made explicit in Figures 1 and 2, implying that the
participatory evaluation process is itself characterised by relations of power and
meaning.
4. Applying the CIAD Framework

To consider the ways in which the CIAD Framework can be applied to analy-
ses of commons governance, I draw upon Cleaver’s (1995, 2000, 2012) work on
water management in Nkayi district, western Zimbabwe. I choose this example
as it is an emblematic critical institutional study that explores institutional emer-
gence and functioning from a complex-embeddedness perspective. Here I focus
on one ‘domain’ in particular: the local institutional arrangement in place to man-
age water access and use of Mtswirini well in the village of Eguqeni, Nkayi. The
example will demonstrate that to understand the form and functioning of this
institutional domain the analytical gaze must be broadened and deepened beyond
a normal mainstream analysis. It is not possible in the space available to give a
16 Luke Whaley
comprehensive account of this expanded analysis so I limit the discussion to a

number of insights that illustrate the benefit of using the CIAD Framework for
undertaking critical institutional research. In doing so, I also point at how it dif-
fers from the mainstream institutional approach engendered by the original IAD
Framework.
4.1. General process of applying the CIAD Framework

To recap, the CIAD Framework requires the analyst to identify the range of inter-
locking and interpenetrating social situations of relevance to the governance
arrangement in question. These social situations are themselves constructed
through the interplay between the rules and resources categories and the internal
elements of the social situation. In each case, the CIAD Framework asks the ana-
lyst to consider the composition of the social situation by identifying the different
participants, their positions and practices, their goals and objectives, strategies
and tactics, and how these emerge in relation to their capabilities, knowledge, val-
ues, and emotions. These different elements are in turn analysed and understood
in relation to the five rules and resources categories. Doing so draws attention to
the interplay between structure and agency, power and meaning, authority, legiti-
macy, and their relationship to processes of institutional bricolage. This itera-
tive analytical process is best served by an ethnographic approach whereby the
researcher delves into the lifeworlds of the participants by undertaking detailed
studies of their everyday lives.
4.2. Defining and analysing the field

A critical institutional analysis will typically start by delineating a broad field
that appears most relevant to the research topic. At this scale, investigating the
interplay between the elements of the field and the rules and resources catego-
ries provides a working understanding of the distribution of resources, including
technological capacities, discourses, physical structures, and salient character-
istics of the landscape and climate. Undertaking a political economy analysis
of the field points to the distribution of power among key participants and to its
historical trajectory. This broader analysis is particularly useful for framing the
general conditions within which particular domains and arenas operate. Cleaver
takes the district of Nkayi as her field, where her analysis identifies several key
features. These include a troubled political economic history, involving a period
of guerrilla warfare, the forced migration of its inhabitants to their current loca-
tions, and the suppression of the Ndebele people by the Government’s Fifth
Brigade after independence. In terms of biophysical and material conditions, she
observes the prevalence of extended periods of drought in what is an already arid
landscape and a dependence on boreholes, small dams, and hand-dug wells for
water. She also notes the presence of two large rivers and several smaller ones,
all of which are seasonal, where in dry periods people dig holes in the riverbed
to access water.
4.3. Identifying relevant domains

Alongside the broad field, a critical institutional approach also takes into account
the wider institutional landscape at the local level. The intention is to identify
the variety of spaces, places, and processes that may have a bearing on the form
and functioning of the institutional arrangement at Mtswirini well. This contrasts
with mainstream institutionalism where typically the focus is the formal organ-
isational arrangement, such as the water point committee, and potentially how it
nests in wider formal structures. Cleaver identifies a number of different domains
that lie beyond the institution domain governing Mtswirini well. These domains
include village ‘meetings of the people’, rainmaking ceremonies, a women’s sav-
ings group, and the ‘invisible’ arrangement mediating traditional access to and
use of the Shangani river. It is incumbent on the analyst to identify those domains
that appear most salient. However, having done so the CIAD Framework then
structures the analysis in ways that help to reveal the key features of each situation
and their relationship to the domain of interest. For example, both critical insti-
tutionalism and the CIAD Framework draw attention to features such as people’s
social positions and relations, everyday practices, forms of knowledge, values,
emotions, goals and objectives (interests), and strategies and tactics (processes of
negotiation and adaption).
4.4. Analysing a relevant domain

Consider Cleaver’s analysis of the management arrangement at the nearby
Shangani River, and how the CIAD Framework accords with it. Here she shows
how the practices, norms, values, and emotions present in this domain also inform
the institutional logic underpinning the domain governing access to and use of
Mtswirini well. These include practices and norms that favour general but con-
ditional access; multiple uses of water, with a balance between domestic and
productive uses to avoid disputes between neighbours; prioritising practices that
preserve water quality for drinking; and the need for only minimal formal man-
agement measures due to general compliance. These practices and norms are
themselves underpinned by knowledge, values, and emotions borne out of the
history of the area, which Cleaver identified previously during her analysis of
the broader field. Most notably, she observes how historical exposure to warfare
and political strife has engendered a strong desire for inclusiveness and conflict
avoidance. Persistent experiences of drought have also shaped people’s values
and practices concerning water use.
These underlying principles help to explain the set of norms and practices
just described and their partial transposition from Shangani River to the inland
well in Eguqeni village. Importantly, the ways in which the norms and practices
are adopted and adapted by users of Mtswirini well reveals that the emergence
of institutional arrangements of this sort are not simply the result of conscious
and deliberative decision making. Instead, they are often partially or even largely
the result of less conscious or non-conscious behaviour as enculturated ways of
18 Luke Whaley
thinking and doing are drawn upon to piece together arrangements as circum-
stances dictate. The analytical approach the CIAD Framework facilitates there-
fore helps to shine a light on processes of institutional bricolage.
4.5. Other benefits of employing the CIAD Framework

The CIAD framework structures and informs the analysis in ways that point
to many other noteworthy aspects of governance arrangements from a critical
institutional perspective. For example, an understanding of the nature of user
boundaries emerges from exploring the relationship between who participates in
the social situation and different rules and resources categories. In this respect,
Cleaver observes how water user boundaries in Eguqeni vary in relation to bio-
physical and material conditions such as seasonal changes and water stress.
Furthermore, the ability of outsiders to access Mtswirini well in times of water
stress also depends on social attributes such as kinship relation and wealth sta-
tus. In contrast to the claims of mainstream institutionalism, these insights sug-
gest that the boundaries that characterise access to natural resources are variable,
dynamic, and ‘fuzzy’.
The addition of new elements and the substitution of the knowledge, capa-
bility, and values elements for the information, control, and costs and benefits
elements in Ostrom’s original framework opens up new analytical possibilities.
For example, considering different people’s knowledge, values, and emotions
in the domain governing Mtswirini well and how these are constructed in rela-
tion to discourse draws attention to the more fundamental ways in which par-
ticipants understand and engage with each other. To this extent, a key finding
from the Nkayi case study was the existence of what Cleaver calls a ‘moral
ecological rationality’. She describes this as a “model of decision making that is
deeply enmeshed in culture, history and agro-ecological conditions but is never-
theless susceptible to modification and change.” This moral ecological rational-
ity functions to order, authorise, and interpret social interaction and hierarchical
relations, legitimising certain types of behaviour whilst disciplining others. It
therefore serves as a form of power-knowledge (Foucault 1980) through which
water management and access in Eguqeni village is achieved. This is a finding
that the original IAD Framework, with its focus on participants’ ‘information’
and ‘costs and benefits’ rather than ‘knowledge’, ‘values’, and ‘discourse’, could
never have arrived at.
4.6. Considering agency, power, and meaning

To understand how participants in the social situation exercise agency (and power)
the analyst examines the strategies and tactics they employ – both consciously and
non-consciously – when engaging in the practices associated with their positions.
As discussed, their potential to exhibit agency is understood in dynamic relation
to the rules and resources that structure the social situation and that may be drawn
upon during the course of social interaction. In the CIAD Framework, the ‘moral-
ecological rationality’ identified above functions as a form of logic through which

people interpret life in Eguqueni village. However, it also functions as a resource
that may be tactically deployed (consciously or non-consciously) by participants
interacting in a social situation and in accordance with their underlying goals and
objectives. As the moral ecological framework links authority in the spiritual and
natural world to authority in the social world (Cleaver 2000), deployment of this
resource will tend to contribute to outcomes that reproduce the status quo. The
extent to which this is the case is however an empirical matter that requires the
analyst to evaluate the outcomes component of the CIAD Framework.
4.7. Analysing arenas

The focus on negotiation, confrontation, and difference moves the analysis from
one social situation, the ‘domain’, to a qualitatively different one, the ‘arena’. As
Long (1999, 1) has argued, it is by studying the dynamics that comprise an arena,
using what he calls an ‘interface analysis’, that the analyst is able to “elucidate
the types and sources of social discontinuity and linkage present in such situations
and to identify the organisational and cultural means of reproducing or transform-
ing them.” In the Nkayi study, Cleaver considers a range of arenas. Here the focus
is on the strategies and tactics different participants employ – for example to bend
or break water management rules – and how these depend on their capability to
mobilise rules and resources.
As the discussion has so far suggested, these strategies or tactics do not rely
on economistic cost-benefit calculations, present in the original IAD Framework,
but on behaviour informed by underlying values, emotions, and forms of knowl-
edge. For example, the water point committee charged with the formal manage-
ment of Mtswirini well does not practice rule enforcement in a strict, graduated
manner. Instead, in keeping with the CIAD Framework’s approach to structure
and agency, Cleaver notes that the committee instead regards these rules as ‘tools’
that are drawn upon in a flexible manner. Key to understanding how and when
the rules are applied are the core values of conflict avoidance and inclusiveness
identified during the analysis of the field.
In another example, Cleaver shows how participants negotiate water pay-
ments by drawing upon legitimate (and legitimising) discourses; social attributes
including being related to the headman, or one’s status as a poor single mother;
physical attributes including disability; and norms of acceptable behaviour (what
is seen as ‘the right way of doing things’). Whilst Cleaver does draw attention to
rules and how they structure the social situation, she also demonstrates how dif-
ferent participants are able to negotiate, bend, or break these rules by exercising
varying degrees of power and agency linked to the distribution of material and
non-material resources. Furthermore, these features of the social situation typi-
cally intersect in ways that point to the complex identities of participants and of
institutions embedded in social relations, history, and underlying values, knowl-
edge, and moral orders.
20 Luke Whaley
4.8. Summing up
Whilst necessarily limited in scope, this section has pointed to the utility of the
CIAD Framework for analysing commons governance arrangements. The inten-
tion has been to provide a flavour of the relationship between the CIAD frame-
work and critical institutional research. It has also considered the ways in which it
facilitates analyses that move beyond mainstream institutionalism’s focus on the
“visible and tangible community efforts to manage natural resources” (Cleaver
2012, 53). The key point to make is that whilst the CIAD Framework does not
substitute for an analyst’s theoretical knowledge, it does reflect the core features
and processes that characterise a critical institutional approach. Its strength there-
fore lies in structuring research in ways that provide a systematic and critical
analysis of the complex-embeddedness of commons governance arrangements.
5. Conclusion
The analytical vistas opened up by the CIAD Framework accommodate system-
atic analyses of complex and socially embedded governance arrangements. These
arrangements are characterised by interlocking and interpenetrating social situa-
tions that bound spaces of both commonality (domains) and difference (arenas)
within larger fields of enquiry. The question of how institutional arrangements
change over time is grounded in an understanding of the recursive relation-
ship between the agency of participants in a social situation and the structure
of that situation. In this paper, I have outlined how the various components of
the CIAD Framework and the ways in which they interrelate brings attention
to this dynamic. This overview was followed by a worked example of how the
CIAD Framework can be applied to analyses of commons governance. To do so,
I drew upon Cleaver’s critical institutional analysis of water management in the
Zimbabwean village of Nkayi.
Here I return to the four key challenges faced by critical institutionalists, men-
tioned at the beginning of this article, by considering the ways in which the CIAD
Framework is able to address them:
1) The ‘complex-embeddedness’ of institutions. The CIAD Framework facil-

itates analyses that situate systems of rules and norms in relation to peo-
ple’s everyday practices, social relationships and identities, and systems of
meaning; within the wider political economy; in history; and in reciprocal
relationship with the biophysical and material world. In doing so, it pro-
motes approaches to understanding commons governance arrangements
that capture the complexity and embeddedness of real-life institutions.
2) Making critical institutional research amenable to the world of policy.
The CIAD Framework helps to ‘map’ or organise research, providing clar-
ity and insight. This same framing provides consistency across different
cases and may be useful to policy makers because of its ability to repre-
sent pictorially and systematically the complexity critical institutionalism

embraces. The CIAD Framework may also prompt questions about pro-
ductive places for policy intervention, whilst better contextualising the
potential impact of said policies. At the same time, it is clear that the chal-
lenge critical institutional research faces in speaking to policy is not com-
pletely overcome by the CIAD Framework, given the rich and detailed
research findings it engenders.
3) Investigating the more hidden, informal, and everyday dimensions of insti-
tutional life. The CIAD Framework’s taxonomy of social spaces (as fields,
domains, and arenas) and its elaboration of the internal workings of these
spaces in terms of people’s everyday practices, values, emotions, and forms
of knowledge, helps to shine a light onto the ‘shadowy places’ institutions
cast. The ways in which social situations are constructed by discourses and
norms (from the rules and resources component of the Framework) further
assists with analysing hidden, informal, and everyday dimensions. Moreover,
the questions the CIAD Framework suggests to the analyst, and the structure
it provides, helps to reveal how the workings of other everyday arrangements
(domains) come to bear on the institutional arrangement under consideration,
as demonstrated in the previous section. This focus assists with analysing
institutional emergence and change as a process of bricolage.
4) Providing explanations of commons governance that foreground the work-
ings of power and meaning. The CIAD Framework embraces a wide range
of approaches for analysing power and meaning. In this article, I con-
sidered in particular how power and meaning are vital ingredients in the
interplay between structure and agency. This structure-agency dynamic
is central to the CIAD Framework. It is by analysing this dynamic that
the Framework draws attention to the distribution of material and non-
material resources available to different participants in the social situa-
tion, their capabilities to access and deploy these resources, and the power
differentials that result. Here ‘non-material resources’ comprise the mean-
ingful or semiotic dimension of social structure, including discourses, pol-
icies, social relations, rules, ideas, and concepts. Both power and meaning
are therefore constitutive and interrelated aspects of analyses that employ
the CIAD Framework.
In concluding, I make one final point concerning a tendency in the literature

to embark on projects that attempt to develop and perfect a single framework
designed to carry out a particular function (such as analyses of social-ecological
systems). I distinguish myself from this position, and argue instead that we should
be cautious of efforts to arrive at ‘one framework to rule them all’. A framework
is only as useful as it is relevant for its user and will be interpreted in different
ways by different people. To this extent, the CIAD Framework could be viewed
as a sort of template – a ‘framework for frameworks’ – that can be adopted and
22 Luke Whaley
adapted by critical institutional scholars in accordance with their disciplinary

training, subject area, and research agenda. At the same time, I hope the current
version provides enough traction to prove useful in this respect.
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International Journal of the Commons

Vol. 9, no 1 March 2015, pp. 1–18

Furthering critical institutionalism

Keywords: Agency, common-pool resources, critical institutionalism,

2. Critical institutionalism: concepts and themes

2.1. Institutional bricolage

In the reworking of the existing institutional arrangements, actors innovate,

3. Institutional dynamics: plurality, hybrity, and scale

3.1. Can bricolage be facilitated? Can it be transformatory?

4. Agency, power, and governance

4.1. Agency, rationalities and meaning

4.2. Differential capacities, variable practices: power and governance

4.3. Physical embodiment, infrastructure and technology

5. Furtherning critical institutionalism

arrangements for natural resource management are multi-stranded, overlapping

Administrative misfits within resource boundaries create room for manoeuvre

paper highlights the patchiness and variability of bricolaged arrangements.

Booth, D. 2012. Development as a Collective Action Problem: Addressing the

Funder, M. and M. Marani. 2015. Local Bureaucrats as Bricoleurs. The Everyday

Mosse, D. 1997. The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource:

The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD)

Abstract: In recent years, ‘critical institutionalism’ has emerged as a school of

Keywords: Critical Institutionalism, Governance, IAD framework, methodo­

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for

of policy, 3) investigating the more hidden, informal, and everyday dimensions

2. Critical institutionalism

2.1. Some challenges

3. The CIAD Framework

Figure 1: The CIAD Framework.

3.1. Philosophical foundation: critical realism

3.2. The rules and resources

in question. Here mainstream institutional insights linking particular resource

3.3. The social situation: field, domain, and arena

Figure 2: The Social Situation.

situations typified by a degree of commonality: a core or cluster of rules, norms,

3.4. The social situation: structure, agency, and system

forms of i­nformation, understanding, and belief.9 The capability element relates

3.5. A note on power and meaning

3.6. Evaluating interactions and outcomes

4. Applying the CIAD Framework

comprehensive account of this expanded analysis so I limit the discussion to a

4.1. General process of applying the CIAD Framework

4.2. Defining and analysing the field

4.3. Identifying relevant domains

4.4. Analysing a relevant domain

4.5. Other benefits of employing the CIAD Framework

4.6. Considering agency, power, and meaning

ecological rationality’ identified above functions as a form of logic through which

4.7. Analysing arenas

1) The ‘complex-embeddedness’ of institutions. The CIAD Framework facil-

sent pictorially and systematically the complexity critical institutionalism

In concluding, I make one final point concerning a tendency in the literature

adapted by critical institutional scholars in accordance with their disciplinary

Crawford, S. and E. Ostrom. 2005. A Grammar of Institutions. In Understanding

Johnson, C. 2004. Uncommon Ground: The ‘Poverty of History’ in Common

Ostrom, E. 1999. Coping with Tragedies of the Commons. Annual Review of

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Keywords: Critical Institutionalism, Governance, IAD framework, methodo

forms of information, understanding, and belief.9 The capability element relates