The Institutional Collective Action Framework

Institutional collective action (ICA) dilemmas arise from the division or partitioning of authority in which decisions by one government in one or more specific functional area impacts other governments and/or other functions. The focus on externalities of choice in fragmented systems integrates multiple research traditions into a conceptual system to understand and investigate collective dilemmas ubiquitous in contemporary governance arrangements. The mechanisms for mitigating ICA dilemmas are classified according to their scope and enforcement. Incentives to participate in a mechanism are hypothesized to favor mechanisms that provide the greatest gain for the least cost under different conditions of collaboration risk as determined by the nature of the underlying ICA problem, the compositions of affected jurisdictions, and institutional contexts. After reviewing empirical applications of the framework, an agenda to advance the theoretical and empirical development of the ICA approach is advanced.