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 the complex-embeddedness of institutions for commons governance, an understanding of institutional change as a process of bricolage, and a foregrounding of power and meaning to explain the workings of governance arrangements. Yet a number of distinct challenges follow from this. Among them is the difficulty of converting critical institutional knowledge into policy advice; of conducting research within and across scales of organisation and distinctly different types of social situation; and of capturing the hidden and invisible dimensions of institutional life. 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. The CIAD Framework has been adapted from Ostrom’s (1990, 2005) original IAD Framework and a later 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. 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.