The Utility of Combining the IAD and SES Frameworks

Abstract

Elinor Ostrom's IAD and SES frameworks are widely used among social scientists, but each framework suffers from significant problems not shared by the other. The IAD framework lacks detail in terms of the specific social and ecological variables that influence social interactions, resulting in inconsistent applications of a supposedly common framework. The SES framework was designed specifically to resolve that problem, but has lost the dynamic character of the IAD framework. As a result it excels at identifying configurations of social, ecological and institutional factors associated with outcomes, but cannot explain the process by which these factors interact across action situations to generate those outcomes, let alone predict or prescribe changes to social-ecological conditions over time. This article seeks to remedy the problems of each framework by combining them to facilitate detailed and process-oriented studies of social-ecological systems. We then demonstrate the utility of the combined IAD-SES framework by applying it to describe the historical development of Maine's lobster fishery. Future applications of the framework have the potential to address several longstanding questions in the literature on common-pool resources regarding the role of history, power and dynamic social and ecological processes in influencing prospects for environmental sustainability.