The critical institutional analysis and development (CIAD) framework

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 institutionalism amendable to the world of policy; investigating the more hidden, informal, and everyday dimensions of institutional life; and providing explanations of commons 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.