“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” So writes Thoreau near the beginning of Walden. Presented with the opportunity to summarize the substantial and inspiring intellectual enterprise that was Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, one could hardly be criticized for heaping praise. Given that the Ostroms’ contributions as human beings were as formidable as their scholarly achievements, hagiography seems unavoidable.

Paul Dragos Aligica—to his credit and our benefit—takes a decidedly different tack in this remarkable and thoughtful book. Rather than pen a broad retrospective account of their influence, he chooses instead to focus on a particular contribution—how the Ostroms, along with others in the Bloomington Workshop, expanded the study of institutions. That Aligica respects (dare I say reveres?) the Ostroms is not in doubt. But rather than play the chanticleer, he chooses a more quiet and persuasive approach.

Understanding and improving the world, the Ostroms’ core mission, is an ambitious task. And Aligica frames their agenda as unfinished, emphasizing the need to keep on keeping on. To borrow Charles Lindblom’s turn of phrase, the Bloomington Workshop is “still muddling and not through yet.” But progress has been made, and the book documents that progress.

At the beginning, in end, and in the middle, this is a book about diversity, about how the Ostroms find wonder and possibility in the diversity of people and institutions that populate our world. Their many books and papers on the various ways in which people collectively allocate and manage resources, solve problems, and just get along constitute a major achievement in social science. They have changed how the rest of us see, model, and analyze institutions.

To take on the Ostroms is to open a large box filled with ideas, facts, frameworks, models, and methodologies. Given the breadth of their research agenda, any book of this length must omit topics (federalism gets almost no play), frameworks (the grammar of institutions does not appear), and methodologies (nothing on the use of experiments) that have a bearing on institutions and political economy. That criticism noted, Aligica’s book benefits from an outline that forges a coherent path through the Ostrom oeuvre. The six primary chapters cover, in order: diversity of people and institutions, polycentricity, the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, resilience, institutional design and predictability, and pragmatism. Though each chapter can (and probably will) function as a stand-alone reading in a graduate course, common themes and references produce a whole that exceeds the parts.

The opening chapter provides context on the importance of including diversity when thinking about institutional design and performance, particularly in the context of collective action problems. For the Ostroms, differences in people were central: What they own, what they believe, what they desire, and how they act influence levels of public good provision, trust, and economic advancement.

Differences in contexts combined with differences in the actors result in distinct institutional solutions. Managing a fish population is not the same as maintaining a herd of cattle. You cannot count the fish. Nor can you relocate them. As each problem offers up a unique set of difficulties, it should not be a surprise that the institutions that emerge from the interactions between the boundedly rational, diverse peoples who try to solve them also differ and do so quite radically.

Social science in such a sphere must be humble. Point prediction may exceed our powers, and we may (to quote E. Ostrom) “have to be satisfied with an understanding of the complexity of structures and a capacity to expect a broad pattern of outcomes from a structure”(p. 10). The challenge then for the Ostroms was to explain and make sense of how this institutional diversity facilitates flourishing patterns of outcomes and to do so without falling prey to a single paradigm or to limit themselves to questions that admit large-n statistical analysis.

Aligica persuasively demonstrates that an important contribution of the Ostrom agenda was to enlarge the context. Much of formal institutional analysis can be characterized as isolationist in that it draws boundaries around problem domains: Here is the solution to a committee bargaining problem, here is the solution to a public goods provision problem with unequal endowments, and so on. The Ostroms were more expansive and modeled a polycentric system of institutions that includes both competitive and cooperative forces.

The embeddedness of the Bloomington Workshop’s approach can be found in the Ostroms’ Institutional Analysis and Development framework, which consists of participants, positions, actions, outcomes, information, and payoffs. Aligica does a marvelous job of explaining the framework, and describing its value as a heuristic device that one can use to undertake a diagnostic or prescriptive analysis, emphasizing that the framework is not a model but a lattice within which one can construct any number of models, even models that disagree in their assumptions, a possibility that the pragmatic Ostroms would happily embrace.

Throughout, Aligica deftly juxtaposes two of the Ostroms’ agendas: the one that seeks to explain and understand institutional diversity and the one that connects that diversity to functional properties of the system—an example of the latter being Vincent’s research on polycentricity. He then pushes the functional argument further and ponders the connection between diversity and resilience writ large. Resilient systems possess both a capacity to absorb shocks and an ability to recover. Diversity aids in both tasks: the former through the law of requisite variety and the latter because of the positive relationship between diversity and speed of adaptation.

Diversity may be the answer, but how, though, do institutions produce the features, such as innovativeness, that encourage robustness? Biology gets innovation without trying through mutation and sexual recombination. The Ostroms believed that social systems require structures that produce novelty in forms that would anticipate future problems.

Such foresight is possible only to a modest extent. We live in a complex world. To be complex means to be unpredictable. Institutions are thought to reduce complexity by producing information and structuring behavior. The former function, as Vincent noticed early on, will not necessarily increase predictability. It could, as we often see in this age of information, lead to even greater complexity. Therefore, the latter function—that of structuring conduct of adaptive, human actors—becomes paramount. But what do we know about how to achieve this?

Thanks to the Ostroms, we now know more than we did previously. That is not to say that Madison’s question— “How can fallable human beings achieve and sustain self-governing entities and self-governing ways of life?”—has been fully answered. It has not. The Ostroms’ agenda, therefore, remains unfinished. And, as Aligica makes clear, the continuation of their endeavor will require the methodological pluralism that the Ostroms long advocated, for who can but agree that a basic logic connects the fact of institutional diversity to the necessity of methodological diversity.

We are fortunate to have a guide with the wisdom and clarity of thought of Aligica as we step into the many directions necessary for exploring that great beyond.