The Practice of Constitutional Development: Vincent Ostrom's Quest to Understand Human Affairs

Each essay shows how particular countries, governments, and organizations devise constitutions to reflect their visions of governance and sets of rules for their leaders. On a higher theoretical level, the contributors emphasize the importance of choosing the rules of the political game in order to determine the nature of the game itself. Extending Ostroms intellectual quest to solve constitutional dilemmas, the scholars gathered here discuss a wide variety of issues, ranging from the problems of water scarcity and local public economies in Africa to the prospect of a new political order in the European North.