We’ll never fully understand what motivates people’s behavior. But we can observe what they actually do in a given set of circumstances, develop models of their decision-making behavior and map that onto data and models of the environment. We can then look across history and time and space to see how people’s decisions and the environment interact."
— J. Marty Anderies
 

The Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity housed in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change is a multidisciplinary endeavor designed to help decision-makers better understand how different types of institutions—defined as the norms and rules people use to govern common resources and provide public goods—perform within different social-ecological systems.
 

Building upon existing theories of institutional development and change, the center explores some of society’s most challenging questions.

• How do we balance conservation with development?
• What sustainability policies are most effective?
• How do we assess the impact of our resource use?

Founded in the summer of 2006, the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity is the sister center of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In addition to heading up the workshop at Indiana University, Elinor Ostrom, Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, has a part-time research professorship at Arizona State University.

At the forefront of technology and research, the center provides an intellectual environment for transdisciplinary scientists investigating the diversity of norms and rules. The faculty employs multiple methods to investigate their research questions, including experiments, ethnographic studies, mathematical modeling and analysis, statistical analysis, social network analysis and archival research to reveal the subtleties of how institutions work—and why they fail or succeed.