ABSTRACT
A wide range of factors influence whether, how and to what extent people derive benefits from natural resources. Such factors might include the prevailing climate, terrain and the condition of the resources, but will also include national policies and legislation, local rules and norms and intra-household relations. These latter kinds of factors can be viewed as institutions. In Chapter 1, institutions were defined as ‘rules of the game’, referring to different types of arrangements that mediate access to benefits from resources. They can be rather elusive and difficult to identify and understand, but there are many tools and approaches that have been developed to investigate the nature and roles of institutions in mediating people–environment relations. Some of these frameworks and approaches are reviewed in other chapters, such as taking a gendered lens in Chapter 4 and the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach in Chapter 5. This chapter focuses on three frameworks and approaches that have institutions at the heart of their analysis of how natural resources are governed, accessed and benefited from. These are Critical Institutionalism, associated with Frances Cleaver (2012), the Environmental Entitlements approach, developed in the 1990s by Melissa Leach, Robin Mearns and Ian Scoones, all at that time based at the Institute of Development Studies, and the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, developed principally by the late Elinor Ostrom of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, USA. A further development of the IAD framework, the Social-Ecological System (SES) framework, is also introduced.
