Critical Institutionalism
Critical Institutionalism
Frances Cleaver
King’s College London, UK
[email protected]
Jessica de Koning
Wageningen University, the Netherlands
[email protected]
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.
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.
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.
4 Frances Cleaver and Jessica de Koning
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.
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
Furthering critical institutionalism 7
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).
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.
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
10 Frances Cleaver and Jessica de Koning
are also the source of symbols and motifs which may be used to legitimise certain
actions, and naturalise institutional and power relationships (Lund 2006).
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.
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.
Furthering critical institutionalism 13
Literature cited
Agrawal, A. 2005. Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the
Making of Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Arts, B., J. Behagel, S. van Bommel, J. de Koning, and E. Turnhout. 2013. Forest
and Nature Governance – A Practice Based Approach. World Forests, 14.
Springer, Dordrecht.
Batterbury, S. 2001. Landscapes of Diversity: A Local Political Ecology of
Livelihood Diversification in South-Western Niger. Cultural Geographies
8(4):437–464.
Berkes, F. 1989. Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community Based
Sustainable Development. London: Belhaven Press.
Blaikie, P. 2006. Is Small Really Beautiful? Community-Based Natural Resource
Management in Malawi and Botswana. World Development 34(11):1942–
1957.
Boelens, R. 2009. The Politics of Disciplining Water Rights. Development and
Change 40(2):307–331.
Furthering critical institutionalism 15
Van der Kooij, S, M. Zwarteveen, and M. Kuper. 2015. The material of the social:
the mutual shaping of institutions by irrigation technology and society in Seguia
Khrichfa, Morocco. International Journal of the Commons 9(1):129–150.
Van Laerhoven, F. and E. Ostrom. 2007. Traditions and Trends in the Study of the
Commons. International Journal of the Commons 1(1):3–28.
Venot, J. P. 2011. What Commons? Rethinking Participation in the Sub-Saharan
African Water Sector, Conference Paper 13th Biennial Conference of the IASC,
Hyderabad, India. January 10–12, 2011.
Verzijl, A. and C. Dominguez. 2015. The Powers of Water Use Associations:on
Multiplicy, Fluidity and Durability in the Peruvian Andes. International Journal
of the Commons 9(1):107–128.
Wong, S. 2009. Lessons from a Transboundary Water Governance Project in West
Africa. In: Participatory learning and action 60 – Community-based Adaptation
to Climate Change 60, eds. H. Reid, M. Alam, R. Berger, T. Cannon, S. Huq,
and A. Milligan. Nottingham: Russel Press.
International Journal of the Commons
Vol. 12, no 2 2018, pp. xx–xx
Publisher: Uopen Journals
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
Luke Whaley
Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, UK
[email protected]
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
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).
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).
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
1
Archer (1995, 2007) calls this ‘central conflation’.
The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) Framework 7
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.
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
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
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).
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).
The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) Framework 11
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).
The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) Framework 13
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
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.
The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) Framework 15
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.
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.
4.8. 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:
Literature cited
Archer, M. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M. 2000. Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Archer, M. 2007. The Trajectory of the Morphogenetic Approach: An Account in
the First-Person. Sociologia, Problemas E Praticas 54(1):35–47.
Berry, S. 1994. Resource Access and Management as Historical Process:
Conceptual and Methodological Issues. 13/1994. Access, Control, and
Management of Natural Resources. Roskilde.
Bhaskar, R. 1979. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of
Contemporary Human Sciences. Brighton, UK: Harvester.
Blomquist, W. and P. DeLeon. 2011. The Design and Promise of the Institutional
Analysis and Development Framework. Policy Studies Journal 39(1):1–7.
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Cleaver, F. 1995. Water as a Weapon: The History of Water Supply Development
in Nkayi District, Zimbabwe. Environment and History 1(3):313–333.
Cleaver, F. 2000. Moral Ecological Rationality, Institutions and the Management
of Common Property Resources. Development and Change 31(2):361–383.
DOI:10.1111/1467-7660.00158.
Cleaver, F. 2001. Institutional Bricolage, Conflict and Cooperation in Usangu.
32(4):26–35. DOI:10.1111/j.1759-5436.2001.mp32004004.x.
Cleaver, F. 2002. Reinventing Institutions: Bricolage and the Social Embeddedness
of Natural Resource Management. European Journal of Development Research
14(2):11–30.
Cleaver, F. 2007. Understanding Agency in Collective Action. Journal of Human
Development 8(2):37–41. DOI:10.1080/14649880701371067.
Cleaver, F. 2012. Development Through Bricolage: Rethinking Institutions for
Natural Resource Management. Oxon, UK: Earthscan.
Cleaver, F. and J. de Koning. 2015. Furthering Critical institutionalism.
International Journal of the Commons 9(1):1–18.
Cleaver, F. and T. Franks. 2008. Distilling or Diluting? Negotiating the Water
Research-Policy Interface. Water Alternatives 1(1):157–176.
Clement, F. 2010. Analysing Decentralised Natural Resource Governance:
Proposition for a ‘Politicised’ Institutional Analysis and Development
Framework. Policy Sciences 43(2):129–156. DOI:10.1007/s11077-009-9100-8.
The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) Framework 23