The Institutional Analysis and Design Approach

The Institutional Analysis and Design Approach

The IAD provides a conceptual map for understanding how institutions, which include public policies, are designed, how people interact in creating and devising policies, and how policy analysts can evaluate policies. At the time of the creation of the IAD framework, much of the policy literature were relatively institutions-free or did not explicitly recognize the institutional foundations of public policies.  The IAD explores some of the main ideas and contributions of the Ostrom Workshop, namely political theory, politics as the art and science of association, polycentricity, methodological individualism, and behavioral rational choice. Ostrom stressed the importance of political theory in the study of public policy, which resulted in developing the following theories to analyse public policy.

1. Behavioral Rational Choice
2. Polycentric theory
3. The theory of commons
4. Theories of Collective Action
5. Evolution theory

The IAD framework was developed by the work of scholars in the Ostrom workshop in political theory and policy analysis. For the first time, it was presented in the work of Kiser and Ostrom in 1982. The framework attempts to explain how collective decisions are made as a result of the individuals’ interactions. It further explains how institutions contribute to shaping the interests and interactions of the actors.

The IAD framework breaks down the works of institutions, using a systematic approach that is based on input, process, output, and feedback cycle. The inputs include the external variables or contextual factors that influence the individual actors. The process is the interaction of the actors among each other. The output of this process is the collective decisions that will be implemented, enforced and evaluated against some criteria.

The IAD framework has significant implications in public policy analysis. Many Ph.D. students and researchers have applied it to the study of public policy in areas such as polycentricity in the United States, decentralization in Nepal and, Health policy in South Africa among others. 

In the video below, Eduardo Araral talks about the IAD framework during the First International Conference on Public Policy. 

Bibliography

Araral, E., & Amri, M. (2016). Institutions and the policy process 2.0: Implications of the IAD Framework. In Contemporary approaches to public policy (pp. 73-93). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Heikkila, T., & Andersson, K. (2018). Policy design and the added-value of the institutional analysis development framework. Policy & Politics, 46(2), 309-324.

References

Araral and Amri on “Institutions and the policy process 2.0: Implications of the IAD Framework.” 2016

Heikkila and Andersson on “Policy design and the added-value of the institutional analysis development framework.” Policy & Politics. 2018

Kiser and Ostrom on “The three worlds of action: A metatheoretical synthesis of institutional approaches”. In Strategies of political inquiry, ed. Elinor Ostrom. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. 1982

Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker on “Rules, games, and common-pool resources”. University of Michigan Press. 1994

In the video below, Eduardo Araral talks about the IAD framework during the First International Conference on Public Policy.