IAD Framework

The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework is a general diagnostic language for studying how rules, physical conditions, and community attributes shape human interaction in any collective-action setting. Developed over decades by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, it places the action situation at its center: the social space where actors in positions take actions under given information, control, and payoffs to produce outcomes. The framework's organizing claim is that this action situation is structured by three sets of exogenous factors, the biophysical conditions, the attributes of the community, and the rules-in-use, and that analysts can explain and compare outcomes by examining how these factors configure the situation. Far from a single theory, the IAD framework is a multi-tier scaffolding into which specific theories and models can be slotted, which is why it has been applied to commons, public goods, federalism, and policy across many fields.