Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development

Abstract

Paul Dragos Aligica and Peter J. Boettke (2009). Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development. The Bloomington School. London and New-York: Routledge.ReviewThe recent passing of distinguished professors Elinor and Vincent Ostrom has bereaved the academic community of the guidance of two prominent scholars. Their intellectual generosity was at the heart of a novel way of doing research: in a collaborative manner, professors and apprentices working side by side, across disciplinary barriers and bringing together diverse research methods and tools, exactly like in a Workshop. This is how the institution they have created at Indiana University was called, a Workshop. While this may sound for some as a very familiar way of doing research nowadays, this was not at all the case when the workshop was founded in 1973. Moreover, they set the foundations for a complex and novel way of building social theory and for connecting it to its practical facet, institutional development and policy analysis.An overview of their legacy and their fundamental contribution to the advancement of research in social sciences is only natural in such circumstances. To achieve this, I am using Paul Dragos Aligica's and Petter Boettke's book "Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development. The Bloomington School" as a vehicle. The book undertakes a careful consideration of the essential contributions to social science Elinor and Vincent Ostrom have brought.The purpose of the above mentioned work is to present in a systematic and comprehensive manner the foundations of the Bloomington School to social science scholars, students and researchers. In the authors' own words, the book is an attempt to "explore, reconstruct and outline the elements of the basic vision of the Bloomington research program in institutional analysis and development - the assumptions, themes and basic philosophy that frame the research activity and theory building done by the scholars associated with this School" (Aligica & Boettke, 2009, p. 4). While the work on common-pool resources and on federalism is better known, this is an outline of the larger context in which this type of research was developed, its history, main premises and concepts.The book is structured in three parts and six chapters, to which the conclusions and a postscript are to be added. The first part presents the theory of governance systems as a natural outgrowth of the 1960s and 1970s debates on metropolitan reform. These chapters introduce the main concepts on which the institutional analysis theoretical framework was built: policentricity and monocentricity, public economy and industry, co-production, the nature of goods and services, and public entrepreneurship. The second part illuminates the reader with regard to the social philosophy developed by Vincent Ostrom, a philosophy that integrates reflections on the "nature of social order, the tension between freedom and organization, the nature and functions of social rules, the role of ideas and belief systems in institutional order and change, and the methodological implications of all of the above" (p. 3). The third part places the Bloomington School in its larger intellectual context as a paradigm that, while being highly connected to the state-of-the-art developments in social sciences and contributing to the emergence of Public Choice, brings back in the picture the way of analysis of classical authors such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, or John Locke. In the conclusions, the Bloomington School is presented as advancing a "science of association", "a science of citizenship", and a "science of liberty". The two interviews in the postscript give the reader the opportunity to get acquainted with the way the founders of the School present themselves, their main theoretical and practical innovations.Further, I will introduce the main concept and proposition on which this theory is built on, and the main implications for the way we are currently doing social research and policy analysis. …