Edella Schlager is the Melody S. Robidoux Foundation Fund Leadership Chair and the director of the School of Government and Public Affairs in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona. She is a founding member of the Institutional Grammar Research Initiative. Her research focuses on the institutional design and analysis of water governance systems. Her work has been published in the International Journal of the Commons, the Policy Studies Journal, Public Administration, and Ecology and Society, among other outlets. She has also contributed chapters to numerous scholarly books, including Theories of the Policy Process, Networks in Water Governance, and The Science of Stories: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework in Public Policy Analysis.

Edella received her Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University, studying under Elinor Ostrom. She was Vincent Ostrom’s last TA before he retired, which she’s sure was just a coincidence. She enjoys baking, mostly breads and pies, and she loves hiking in the desert and mountains surrounding Tucson.

Selected publications:

Schlager, E., and Villamayor-Tomas, S. (2023). The IAD Framework and its Tools for Policy and Institutional Analysis. In C. Weible (Ed.), Theories of the Policy Process, 5th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Pieper, L., Ruiz, S., Schlager, E., & Schweik, C. (2023). “The Use of the Institutional Grammar 1.0 for Policy Analysis: A Literature Review.” International Journal of the Commons, 17(1), 256–270.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1214

Herzog, L., Ingold, K., & Schlager, E. (2021). Prescribed by law and therefore realized? Analyzing rules and their implied actor interactions as networks. Policy Studies Journal, 50(2), 366-386.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12448