A Review of Paul Dragos Aligica

At the end of her Nobel Prize address, Elinor Ostrom (2010, p. 665) wrote that ‘to explain the world of interactions and outcomes occurring at multiple levels, we also have to be willing to deal with complexity instead of rejecting it.’ She asserted that institutional theorists across disciplines must go ‘beyond markets and states’ to observe the multitude of alternative institutional arrangements that individuals craft to govern their interactions. Inspired by this message, Paul Dragos Aligica embraces the task of synthesizing into a coherent paradigm the underlying themes that resonate throughout Elinor and Vincent Ostrom's political economy, a body of work that is empirically rooted in four decades of case studies analyzing problems of collective action and self-governance. Aligica also explores concepts latent in the Bloomington School that have the potential to spawn new developments in institutional theory for dealing ‘systematically with the theoretical, empirical, and normative problems of heterogeneity and its consequence and condition, institutional diversity’ (p. xii).