A MORPHOGENETIC APPROACH TO THE OSTROM’S IAD FRAMEWORK Water Governance and its Contingent Transformations in Post-colonial South

This paper depicts the merits and limits of IAD Framework in its use for understanding institutional transformation within the water development sector. The IAD Framework accounts the rules affecting institutional operations as well as the context of rules that are internal and external to the action situation or the settings in which actors actively contest options and influence the outcomes of policy making. The concept of action situation with its complex characteristics (institutional rules in use, physical properties, and the nature of the communities within which actors are situated) assigns equal importance to both the individual actors and the institutional context (McGinnis, 2005: 170). While the IAD Framework allows one to portray institutional complexity in detail, its analytical power is limited to systematically register the temporal dimension in which relevant institutions undergo meaningful transformations. Consequently, the Framework is powerless to predict new contexts in future time that influence subsequent social interactions with which decision making will be shaped. We argue that the IAD Framework had better be aided by the principles in critical realism for capturing the deep contours of actors-institutions relations, within the different strata of actualized powers and with the emergent causal powers involving unlimited possibility of different relational properties. The critical realist morphogenetic approach to structure-agency relations locate constraints and opportunities that affect individuals within a range of temporal dimensions of structural conditioning in parallel to the ability of agents in structural elaboration (Archer 1995). One might incorporate the critical realist scientific tradition to enrich the IAD Framework in continuing the long commitment of Ostrom for understanding community institutional dynamics and their promises beyond the state and the market. This is especially crucial within the world’s current unprecedented changes and within the undertheorized post-colonial South.