This panel will host a roundtable discussion on the opportunities and challenges posed by the integrative study of state-reinforced self-governance (SRSG) via the Institutional Grammar (IG). The panel chairs and audience will be invited to discuss the following key topics, as well as questions and topics generated by the panel moderator(s) and audience: (1) What are “commons” in state-reinforced and other societal systems, where government(s) affect (e.g., enable, constrain, contribute to) the creation, governance, and/or management of commons (reconceptualizing the State, non-state, and the commons)? (2) What can IG methods tell us about State power, Faustianing bargaining (i.e., constitutional decision-making underlying society’s fundamental social contracts), and the constitution of polycentric self-governing societies (conceptualizing State power and constitutional choice)? (3) How can concepts of power and SRSG be studied, measured, and assessed using the IG (multimethods and metrics in the study of SRSG)? and (4) How do we envision future opportunities and directions for the development of the IG, SRSG Framework, and the study of the commons (future perspectives)?
Recent developments in the concept of state-reinforced self-governance (SRSG) are enabling institutional analysts to rethink the role of the State (or states across different jurisdictional scales) in facilitating and constraining self-governing, adaptive, and transformative solutions to complex societal dilemmas. However, the methods needed to analyze formal policy documents, and informal rules-in-use, in order to evaluate SRSG are underdeveloped. This panel will convene case study papers that apply the Institutional Grammar (IG) in novel ways to examine SRSG. We also seek papers that apply novel techniques designed to simultaneously inform the IG and the SRSG conceptualization of the State, State power, self-governance, and the commons.
It’s been 30 years since the Institutional Grammar (IG) was first introduced as a theoretical concept by Sue Crawford and Elinor Ostrom. Since then, the IG has seen widespread use. Applications of the IG offer methodological refinements and opportunities, demonstrate how it can be applied toward the measurement of a variety of institutional concepts, and illustrate how it is readily paired with a variety of social science models, theories, and frameworks in empirical studies of institutional phenomena. Yet, even with its extensive application and development, much of its original conceptualization remains underexplored. This panel invites papers that revisit fundamental Institutional Grammar topics that have to date received limited attention as a way to energize research on these topics. Potential areas of inquiry include exploring the behavioral theory underlying the IG, delta parameters, differentiating rules, norms, and strategies, pragmatics of the IG, among others.
The IG offers a valuable methodological approach for studying the design and performance of institutional arrangements governing collective action. This panel will feature papers in which the IG is applied alongside theories of collective action and various methodological approaches toward empirical assessment of collective action dilemmas, how institutional arrangements align individual and group interests, and related institutional phenomena. Papers will exhibit diversity in topical domains, and as a set, will showcase how the IG can be used to advance understanding of collective action in governing the commons.
The Institutional Grammar (IG) is a widely used method for analyzing institutional design, focusing on both the structure and meaning of institutions. While both rules-in-use and rules-in-form are essential for governing common-pool resources and addressing social dilemmas, the IG has primarily been developed to analyze rules-in-form. The complexities of rules-in-use, along with challenges in collecting them, limit the direct application of existing coding protocols designed for rules-in-form. One such challenge is the potential presence of inconsistencies between institutional statements provided by research participants. In this work, we propose a method to address both intra- and inter-participant inconsistencies. We demonstrate how to analyze these discrepancies at both the institutional statement and grammatical element levels, offering strategies for incorporating them into the analysis.
Institutional theory and analysis are the basis for commons research in social science. Scholars continue to explore ways to improve theory and measurement to better understand institutional phenomena, such as State (governmental) involvement in collective and self-governing solutions to commons dilemmas. Recent developments in the concept of state-reinforced self-governance (SRSG) and institutional analysis through the Institutional Grammar (IG) are illustrative. This paper offers an integrated application of the SRSG and IG to formally explore theoretical and analytical opportunities, operational steps, and potential for future research. It does so in the context of fisheries management—a complex multi-scale dilemma involving diverse actors, policies, and ecological factors.
The SRSG framework identifies four principles by which governments enable adaptive and transformative capacities of governance bodies via polycentric, self-governing systems: adequate responsibility, authority, operational resources, and flexibility/stability to engage in (a) multistakeholder cooperation (cf. Ostrom 1990) and (b) constitutional, administrative, and operational decision-making to modify important rule systems and production activities. The reliable and rigorous measurement of these principles is fundamental.
We develop the IG to support this measurement. We address several interlocking theoretical and methodological questions. For example, how are State power, State-reinforced cooperation, and capacity for self-governance represented and transmitted to key actors in formal policy? What role(s) do councils play in adaptive/transformative governance; how are these roles tied to fundamental characteristics (design principles)? What regulative and constitutive statements define critical aspects of responsibility, authority, operational resources, and flexibility/stability? What syntactic patterns emerge among principles? How can these patterns inform understanding of constitutional, administrative, and operational decision-making?
We examine the 2007 Magnuson-Stevens Act governing the formation and operation of U.S. fishery management councils. The Act is the most important legal document guiding and potentially reinforcing the operations of fishery management councils to make policy decisions. Overall, this research advances the study of SRSG by clarifying how recent IG advancements support diagnosis of SRSG principles. Theoretically, it may provide tools to address foundational questions about State involvement in adaptive/transformative governance.
Conservation treaties are agreed-upon institutional (rule) configurations designed to create mechanisms that share information on global biodiversity conditions and are adjustable to changing social and ecological conditions so that core treaty objectives are continuously met. Since adjustments in treaty rules can lead to fragilities elsewhere, the goal is to create a governance system that can cope with change while maintaining core conditions within acceptable parameters, e.g., to prevent species extinctions and biodiversity declines. Polycentric institutional design is thought to provide such flexibility. However, few studies have examined whether treaty rule configurations are indeed polycentric and how this may influence adaptability to change.
Polycentric systems are defined by three overarching attributes: (1) they consist of many centers of decision-making; (2) they are governed by a single system of rules that can be institutionally or culturally enforced; and (3) they foster contestation of ideas, methods, and “ways of life” that lead to the emergence of a spontaneous social order that fosters the ability to change. The Logical Structure of Polycentricity (LSP) framework provides indicators for each of the three attributes (Aligica & Tarko 2012). We couple the LSP framework with the Institutional Grammar 2.0 to measure these indicators and explore the polycentric elements of the formal institutional design of four international conservation treaties. We then provide a categorization of the degree of polycentricity evident in each treaty design with a particular focus on how the identified elements may privilege certain actors with more power to shape conservation governance, and how these power dynamics may affect trustworthiness and collective action within treaty regimes.
Citations: Aligica & Tarko (2012). Polycentricity: from Polanyi to Ostrom, and beyond. Governance, 25(2), 237-262.
International conservation governance is key to staving off transboundary threats to individual species and preserving the biodiversity upon which life on this planet depends. However, much remains to be learned about the formal institutional design of international instruments, and how that design may influence a treaty’s own conservation/sustainable use objectives. The Institutional Grammar (IG 2.0) advances a syntax that facilitates the examination of both regulative and constitutive institutional statements making it possible to gain a holistic understanding of the institutional design of any policy instrument.
This study capitalizes on the IG 2.0 to measure and analyze the internal institutional fit generated by the aspirations, objectives, and contextual parameters (constitutive statements), and the guidance provided to actors within the governance system (regulative statements) of four international conservation treaties with a focus on monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. First, the relevant statements in the convention texts are parsed into their syntactic elements to determine key actors, activities, and the stringency/necessity of actions/system parameters. Second, the parsed statements are coded by rule type to identify the prevalent monitoring and enforcement rule configurations using Ostrom’s regulative rule typology definitions which were expanded to constitutive rules. We also advance a new set of constitutive rule types to capture the unique aspirational and contextual parameters evident in constitutive statements.
The constitutive/regulative rule configurations were then analyzed to measure the horizontal institutional fit among monitoring and enforcement mechanisms in each treaty. Preliminary findings suggest that monitoring and enforcement are more effective in regimes where constitutive rules outlining governance aims and constraints are directly linked to the behavioral guidance expressed in regulative rules, whereas governance by aspiration, i.e., by a preponderance of constitutive rules, may be challenged in its implementation.
Constitutions play a key role in defining the structure, roles, rights, and responsibilities of nation states. Extant research has analyzed how features of constitutional design contribute to the materialization of democratic principles, including the separation of powers (V. Ostrom, 2008; Brinks, Levitsky & Murillo, 2019; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2019). Recent research applying the Institutional Grammar (IG) highlights the utility of the IG in deciphering how legal concepts are embedded within constitutions (DeMatee, 2023). Nevertheless, systematic use of the IG to characterize how specific characteristics of democracy materialize in constitutional architecture is yet to be developed.
This paper intends to make a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we use the IG 2.0 to understand how features of democracy materialize in Constitutional texts, using the theory of separation of powers as a basis for our analysis. Second, we aim to test, refine, and expand the current characterizations of the constitutive functions proposed by Frantz and Siddiki (2022). As such, we aim to answer a) what types of entities are being constituted in the constitutions of nation states, b) what types of constitutive functions are assigned to said entities, in relation to the principle of separation of powers, and c) whether, and if so how, do these entities and corresponding functions capture the theoretical features of the separation of powers.
To do this, we use a comparative case study approach. We purposefully selected constitutions from six countries, two in North America, two in South America, and two in Europe, to consider different legal traditions (common law and civil law) and regimes to conduct the study. Once identified, we focus on a particular subject of the Constitution, the provisions related to the separation of powers, and code each institutional statement using the IG. We later look for patterns and differences in the way each Constitution captures the idea of separation of powers.
© 2025 | Privacy & Cookies Policy
