Martín, Andrea

Effective governance of common-pool resources relies on well-defined institutions that guide the proper management of shared natural resources. Decision-making processes in response to collective action dilemmas are influenced by the diversity of rules, norms and strategies, which enable multiple responses for communities facing uncertainties across diverse socio-economic, environmental, and political contexts. Our study examines four common-pool resources governance systems (forestry, fishery, pastoralism, and irrigation) from Europe, Africa, and South America. For each case, we applied the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework’s rules typology, a novel taxonomy of rules, and the Institutional Grammar to decompose the institutional arrangements and classify them in rules, norms and strategies. We measured institutional diversity through the calculation of the alpha and beta diversity, tools borrowed from the life sciences to quantify the richness of rules and to compare the diversity of rules within and across governance systems. Results revealed significant differences in institutional configurations, highlighting dissimilarities in the number and type of rules, taxonomies and the grammatical elements among the case studies. Beta diversity reflected two key processes that shaped the institutional configurations in the case studies: the replacement of rules that are absent in one case but present in another (turnover), and the presence of specific rules that are absent in other case studies, without being replaced by additional rules (nestedness). The partitioning of beta diversity enabled us to identify the mechanisms that modulate institutional diversity by influencing the equivalences and divergences of rules, norms and strategies amidst diverse governance systems. Furthermore, the linkages and connections of different types of rules underscored the complexity of these systems at the management of the shared natural resources. These results highlight the importance of recognizing institutional diversity when developing adaptive management strategies for the governance of common-pool resources.

Institutional diversity, i.e. the variety of rules, norms, and strategies used to share common and public resources, reflects governance adaptation to social and ecological contexts. Here, we analyse institutional diversity in four pastoral systems by studying their rules-in-use. Although the rules-in-use are essential for the management of natural resources in livestock systems, the analysis of the data presents significant challenges due to the difficulty of coding this valuable information. To address this, we apply a novel approach that combines in-depth interviews with diversity measure tools to quantify the institutional diversity of traditional pastoral communities. Data obtained from in-depth interviews to local community farmers in four livestock systems from arid and semi-arid areas in three countries (Mexico, Morocco, and Spain) were coded using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework’s rules typology, a new proposal of taxonomy of rules, and the Institutional Grammar. We used the Institutional Grammar to distinguish actors, action situations, and their consequences, and quantifying the grammatical components responsible of institutional diversity. In addition, we classified the institutional statements as rules, norms and strategies based on their grammatical elements. The quantification of grammatical components and taxonomy reflected the stability of specific rules, as well as the proportion of actors involved in the decision-making, sanctioning and incentive mechanisms, revealing where diversity lies. The results allowed us to identify patterns in institutional design within these communities and to compare the similarities and dissimilarities between communities from different geographical, socio-economic, and political context.