This book discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research program on institutional diversity associated with the 2009 co-recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this program.

This text discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research programme on institutional diversity associated with the 2009 co-recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this programme.

The analysis of how institutions are formed, how they operate and change, and how they influence behavior in society has become a major subject of inquiry in politics, sociology, and economics. A leader in applying game theory to the understanding of institutional analysis, Elinor Ostrom provides in this book a coherent method for undertaking the analysis of diverse economic, political, and social institutions. Understanding Institutional Diversity explains the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, which enables a scholar to choose the most relevant level of interaction for a particular question. This framework examines the arena within which interactions occur, the rules employed by participants to order relationships, the attributes of a biophysical world that structures and is structured by interactions, and the attributes of a community in which a particular arena is placed. The book explains and illustrates how to use the IAD in the context of both field and experimental studies. Concentrating primarily on the rules aspect of the IAD framework, it provides empirical evidence about the diversity of rules, the calculation process used by participants in changing rules, and the design principles that characterize robust, self-organized resource governance institutions.

The work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom represents a distinctive contribution to the study of political economy, public policy and administration, collective action, and governance theory. Efforts to present a comprehensive overview of the Bloomington School that grew around the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (now renamed the Ostrom Workshop), which they founded more than 40 years ago, received new impetus with the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science to Elinor Ostrom in 2009. Since then, renewed attempts have been made to map the Ostroms’ contributions to theories of polycentric governance and collective action, and to multi-methods and comparative institutional analysis of ways of managing social and ecological systems, common pool resources, public economies, and metropolitan reform. The open-ended and multiform nature of the Ostroms’ research program defies a single comprehensive overview; yet, it is a stimulus towards both creativity and disciplinary cross-fertilization in social science research. What sets this volume apart is that it brings together theory and practice, models and work on the ground, design and creativity, empirics and norms, to outline the significance of the Ostroms’ research program for the future. Each contribution to the volume takes the Ostromian perspective as the point of departure, amplifies it and explores the ground for future work by engaging with other approaches and areas of research with which the Bloomington School has some affinities. This way of testing and extending the ideas and methods of the Ostroms is particularly appropriate since their research program, initiated and nurtured through the Workshop, has always been in-between different fields and sub-fields in the social sciences (political science, economics, public administration, law, history, anthropology), cultivating a strong interdisciplinary way of doing research and exploiting the virtuous circle between theory, analysis, model building, and empirical research. Engaging in a creative dialogue with ideas and methods of other research programs is a way of sharpening one’s analytic tools, while renovating one’s own vision of social research. This volume is a way of thinking through and beyond the Bloomington School.

Freedom in Contention examines the workings and impacts of social movements, using the conceptual and analytical tools of liberal political economy. This important book will appeal to political economists, sociologists, philosophers, historians, and other researchers interested in social movements as forces for societal change.

Tackles one of the most enduring and contentious issues of positive political economy: common pool resource management.

This book considers why institutional forms of modern capitalist economies differ internationally, and proposes a typology of capitalism based on the theory of institutional complementarity. Different economic models are not simply characterized by different institutional forms, but also by particular patterns of interaction between complementary institutions which are the core characteristics of these models. Institutions are not just simply devices which would be chosen by 'social engineers' in order to perform a function as efficiently as possible; they are the outcome of a political economy process. Therefore, institutional change should be envisaged not as a move towards a hypothetical 'one best way', but as a result of socio-political compromises. Based on a theory of institutions and comparative capitalism, the book proposes an analysis of the diversity of modern economies - from America to Korea - and identifies five different models: the market-based Anglo-Saxon model; Asian capitalism; the Continental European model; the social democratic economies; and the Mediterranean model. Each of these types of capitalism is characterized by specific institutional complementarities. The question of the stability of the Continental European model of capitalism has been open since the beginning of the 1990s: inferior macroeconomic performance compared to Anglo-Saxon economies, alleged unsustainability of its welfare systems, too rigid markets, etc. The book examines the institutional transformations that have taken place within Continental European economies and analyses the political project behind the attempts at transforming the Continental model. It argues that Continental European economies will most likely stay very different from the market-based economies, and caat political strategies promoting institutional change aiming at convergence with the Anglo-Saxon model are bound to meet considerable opposition.