spacepolicies.org
Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework
When the Rules on Paper and the Rules in Practice Are Different Regimes
A regulator of satellite services, asked to describe how the spectrum coordination regime works, can produce the authoritative text in minutes. The ITU Radio Regulations, the coordination procedures, the notification filings, the deadlines, the appeals, the bilateral negotiation protocols — all set out with the authority the regime demands. Asked then why, in practice, early filers with no operational capability consume coordination resources that operational operators need; why power asymmetries between large and small states produce bilateral outcomes that the formal aggregation rules would not predict; why the queue of filings has grown to a length the framework was never designed to accommodate — the regulator will acknowledge each observation and say: yes, that is what actually happens. The regime on paper and the regime in practice are both real. They are not the same regime.
This is the gap the Institutional Analysis and Development framework exists to make analytically tractable. Its premise is that governance outcomes are produced by rules-in-use, not rules-on-paper, and that systematic analysis of the action arena, the biophysical conditions, the community attributes, and the seven rule types in actual practice reveals why governance regimes succeed or fail. The framework is the most influential analytical tool in commons governance, and it is increasingly relevant in the space domain because so many of the domain’s interesting governance problems — orbital slots, spectrum, cislunar space, lunar surface resources — are commons problems. What follows is an account of where the framework comes from, what it sees that other methods do not, and where its analytical demand is appropriate.
Ostrom, Indiana, and the Refutation of a Famous Essay
The framework’s intellectual core is Elinor Ostrom’s work at Indiana University’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, developed across several decades with collaborators including Vincent Ostrom, Larry Schroeder, Susan Wynne, and many others. Ostrom’s 1990 Governing the Commons remains the foundational text, and her 2005 Understanding Institutional Diversity is the systematic statement of the mature framework.
The framework’s origin story turns on the refutation of Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which argued that shared resources were inevitably overexploited unless privatized or placed under central government control. Hardin’s binary — commons either fail or are dissolved into property or state — had become the default assumption in policy discourse. Ostrom’s field research on irrigation systems, fisheries, forests, and grazing commons across multiple continents demonstrated that communities had, for centuries, governed shared resources successfully through neither pure market nor pure state mechanisms, but through institutional arrangements — rules-in-use, enforcement norms, adjudication practices — that Hardin’s framework could not see. The IAD framework was her primary analytical tool for understanding how these arrangements worked and why some succeeded while others failed.
Ostrom’s 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics recognized that the framework had reshaped the intellectual field. The prize citation specifically noted her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons, and the demonstration that self-organized institutional solutions were viable alternatives to the binary Hardin had proposed. The framework has since been applied across environmental governance, development economics, network infrastructure governance, and increasingly in questions of space domain commons.
The framework contrasts with approaches that read governance either through the lens of pure rational-choice theory (which takes rules as given and predicts behavior) or through pure power analysis (which treats formal rules as epiphenomena). IAD’s distinctive claim is that rules matter and behavior matters, that neither can be reduced to the other, and that the analytical work is tracing how rules — in their actual, practiced form — combine with biophysical conditions and community attributes to produce the patterns of interaction a governance regime exhibits.
What the Method Actually Sees
The characteristic analytical move is the disaggregation of what analysts usually treat as a single object — “the rules” — into seven distinct rule types, each with its own analytical logic.
The disaggregation is not pedantic. Governance failures occur at specific rule levels, and reforms succeed or fail depending on whether they target the right level. A regime suffering from aggregation-rule failure (consensus requirements that paralyze decision-making) will not be fixed by adjusting payoff rules (stronger sanctions); a regime suffering from information-rule failure (insufficient disclosure) will not be fixed by changing position rules (creating new roles). The framework’s value lies in precisely locating the failure.
A second move is the rules-in-use versus rules-on-paper distinction, which is the framework’s central diagnostic. Formal rules are public, auditable, and often wrong about what actually happens. Rules-in-use are the de facto regime — the practiced version of each of the seven rule types. The gap between them is the most analytically valuable finding the framework produces. A boundary rule that formally admits all participants but in practice admits only those with the resources to navigate filing requirements is not the same rule in practice as on paper. An aggregation rule that formally requires consensus but in practice is decided by a small group whose veto threat deters formal objection is not the same rule in practice as on paper. The framework insists on reading the practiced version.
A third move is the integration of biophysical conditions and community attributes with the rule analysis. Rules do not produce behavior alone; they interact with the physical characteristics of the resource and with the characteristics of the participating community. A resource with high subtractability (one user’s consumption reduces another’s access) and low excludability (participants cannot easily be kept out) produces one kind of commons problem; a resource with different properties produces another. A community with high trust, shared norms, and long time horizons sustains rules that a fragmented community with short horizons cannot sustain. The framework refuses to analyze rules in isolation from these conditions.
A fourth move is outcome evaluation against explicit criteria. The framework evaluates governance outcomes against efficiency (resource use relative to optimum), equity (distribution of access and outcomes), sustainability (resource condition over time), adaptability (regime capacity to respond to change), and accountability (mechanisms for holding actors responsible). These criteria can conflict — an efficient regime may be inequitable, a sustainable regime may be unadaptive — and the framework forces the analyst to make the trade-offs explicit rather than collapsing them into a single score.
A fifth move is the diagnostic-to-design handoff. The framework is primarily diagnostic: it excels at identifying where governance fails and at the level at which it fails. It is less opinionated about design. The typical handoff is to Institutional Design Analysis, which takes the diagnosis as input and proposes reform options. Using IAD as a design tool rather than a diagnostic one tends to produce recommendations that are thinly evidenced; the framework’s characteristic strength is the diagnostic rigor, and the handoff preserves that strength.
Reading the ITU Orbital Slot Coordination Regime
Consider the canonical space-domain application: orbital slot allocation through the ITU coordination process. The action arena is specific. States file satellite network notices with the Radiocommunication Bureau. The Bureau examines filings for interference with existing systems. Affected parties negotiate bilaterally to resolve conflicts. Coordination agreements are registered. Operational use follows.
Biophysical conditions: orbital slots and associated frequencies are a commons with moderate subtractability (interference constrains co-location) and low natural excludability (physics does not exclude filers; institutions must). Spatial extent is global in one sense (GEO is a single ring around the Earth) and location-specific in another (longitudes over particular markets are more valuable). Temporal dynamics have shifted: satellite operational lives have extended, which changes how slots recycle.
Community attributes: the community includes high-capacity spacefaring states with operational fleets, mid-capacity states with growing operational portfolios, low-capacity states with regulatory but not operational roles, and commercial operators whose interests are partially independent of their flag states. Heterogeneity is high. Trust is uneven and has eroded in recent years. Time horizons diverge sharply across participants.
The seven rule types, read in use:
Position rules: formally, the positions are filer, notifier, coordinating party, and Bureau examiner. In practice, the filer role has expanded to include a class of paper filers — states that file without operational intent, sometimes as placeholders and sometimes to trade access. The expanded role is not in the formal rules; it is a rule-in-use shaped by the absence of a filing-cost mechanism.
Boundary rules: formally, all ITU member states can file. In practice, the resources required to file, coordinate, and defend a filing exclude states with thin regulatory capacity, and include states with sophisticated filing services regardless of operational capacity. The practiced boundary is capacity-based; the formal boundary is membership-based.
Authority rules: formally, authority is distributed across the Bureau (examination), filing states (notification and coordination), and affected states (objection). In practice, large operators — through their flag states — wield authority disproportionate to their formal position, because their active fleets generate more coordination events than smaller operators’ filings.
Aggregation rules: formally, coordination is bilateral between affected parties, with the Bureau as facilitator. In practice, asymmetries between large and small operators mean bilateral negotiations often concede to the larger party, and the formal equality of positions does not survive the negotiation.
Information rules: formally, filings must include specified technical parameters and be publicly registered. In practice, filings frequently include strategically vague parameters that preserve optionality, and the information asymmetry between sophisticated and less-sophisticated filers is substantial.
Payoff rules: formally, filings have fees and conformance requirements. In practice, the payoff structure rewards early filing regardless of operational capability, because first-come-first-served priority translates filing dates into positional value that can be monetized or held for leverage.
Scope rules: formally, the regime governs non-interference between filings. In practice, the regime increasingly governs commercial positional rights — a scope its designers did not fully anticipate.
The diagnostic reading is that the regime is producing paper filings, queue congestion, and de facto early-filer precedence, and that these outcomes emerge from the interaction of payoff rules (no cost to paper filing), position rules (no operational-capability requirement), and the community’s growing heterogeneity (filers with no operational intent have entered the system). Reforms targeted at the payoff and position rules — filing fees tied to operational commitments, bring-into-use requirements — address the failure at the level at which it occurs. Reforms targeted elsewhere — streamlining Bureau procedures, for example — do not. The non-obvious insight is that the regime’s problems are not procedural but structural, and the structure is located in specific rule types rather than in the system as a whole.
Where It Shines, Where It Limps
The IAD framework excels at diagnosing governance regimes in multilateral or polycentric settings, at locating the specific rule level at which failure occurs, and at revealing the gap between formal rules and practiced rules. It is the right instrument for commons-governance questions — orbital slots, spectrum, cislunar space, lunar surface resources — and for any governance analysis where multiple actors with different authorities interact under rules whose enforcement is imperfect. When a regime is producing outcomes its formal design did not intend, no other method is as direct about why.
Its limits are honest. The framework has high analytical overhead; it is comprehensive but time-intensive, and it is overkill for simple bilateral regulatory questions. It requires deep knowledge of actual institutional practice, not just formal legal texts, and rules-in-use are often hard to observe from outside; honest analyses declare the information gaps rather than filling them with formal rules treated as practiced ones. The framework is better at diagnosing problems than prescribing solutions; the Institutional Design Analysis handoff exists precisely because the diagnostic strength does not automatically translate into design guidance.
The framework was developed for terrestrial commons — fisheries, forests, irrigation systems — and its adaptation to space requires careful rethinking of subtractability and excludability. Orbital slots have different subtractability characteristics from fish stocks; spectrum has different excludability characteristics from grazing lands; lunar resource sites have different spatial logic from forests. The framework does not map automatically; it requires adaptation, and a lazy application produces analogies that do not hold.
A final limit is that the framework does not inherently address power asymmetries. Dominant actors may shape rules regardless of institutional design logic, and IAD describes the rules without fully explaining why the practiced versions take the forms they do. The natural complement is power analysis — realist power analysis in particular — which supplies the explanatory variable the framework treats as exogenous.
Within the library, IAD’s rule-level findings feed into Liberal Institutionalism’s assessment of whether governance addresses cooperation problems. The rules-in-use diagnosis is the input Institutional Design Analysis uses for reform proposals. Realist Power Analysis explains why certain rules-in-use diverge from rules-on-paper. Constructivist Analysis traces how norms emerge from or reshape the rules IAD catalogs. Game Theory supplies the formal structure of incentive problems the rules either resolve or leave unresolved. IAD is the structural diagnosis around which several of these methods orbit.