ABSTRACT
The intellectual history of the Institutional Analysis and Development program starts in the 1960s in the midst of a heated debate on the nature and objectives of the public administration reform in American metropolitan areas. From the very beginning it was as much a political theory debate as it was a public policy one. By the time Vincent Ostrom and a small group of scholars later to be associated to the prehistory of the Bloomington program started to explore the condition of public governance in metropolitan areas, both practitioners and the mainstream social scientists had long decided that the administration of those areas was in trouble (E. Ostrom [1972] in McGinnis 1999b, 140-141). Their diagnostic was based on a seemingly plausible account of the origins of the problem. A metropolitan region was viewed as one large community, functionally integrated by economic and social relationships. However, its functional unity was artificially divided administratively by ad hoc governmental units. A metropolitan region had no unitary administrative identity and it did not even exist from a legal standpoint (Hawley and Zimmer 1970, 2; Institute for Local Self Government 1970; Friesema 1966, 69). Instead, there were many federal and state governmental agencies, counties, cities, and special districts, each with its separate jurisdiction, overlapping and subverting each other, making efficient administration impossible. These disparate units of government, acting autarchic, were unable to perform the functions they were meant to perform. Even worse, without an overarching coordination center, each unit of local government acted in its own interest, without regard for the public interest of the metropolitan community. In other words, the diagnostic was straightforward. At the origin of the metropolitan administrative troubles there was one single cause: “the existence of a large number of independent public jurisdictions within a single metropolitan area” (E. Ostrom [1972] in McGinnis 1999b, 140-141; Institute for Local Self Government 1970).
