Session 7. 4. B.

Institutional diversity plays a pivotal role in shaping the governance of industrial agriculture, particularly as it interacts with technological developments in plant breeding. Advanced breeding technologies and local to global market dynamics coevolve with crops, influenced by socio-economic and cultural factors. This paper proposes an ontology to epistemology approach thereof for tracing institutional evolution and its influence on the genetic pools of crops. By integrating the concepts of cultural evolution, like multilevel selection theory and generalized evolutionary theory, I explore how the coevolution of plant breeding systems in their functional and organizational arrangements shapes the retention and transmission of crop genetic diversity.

As a governance research community we currently lag an approach that adequately accounts for the evolutionary dynamics and multi-level nature of the researched social-ecological systems for industrialized agriculture. To fill this gap between epistemology to methodology, I apply notions of sociogenomic methods—typically used to trace social behaviors in genetic material—to quantify the impact of institutional factors on crop genetics. By altering these methods and combining them with Multilevel Selection Theory and evolutionary economics, the study provides a new approach to empirically track institutional impacts on the genetic diversity of crops. Using the German seed systems for canola and winter wheat as case studies, I demonstrate how institutional and technological factors can be mirrored in quantitative analyses. I see this paper as a potential piece for the study of institutional diversity in an industrialized context offering a coevolutionary perspective contributing to agricultural resilience and biodiversity conservation.

Institutional diversity refers to the variety of rules and norms used to govern shared resources. Its importance for the long-term sustainability of these systems has been widely recognized, as it can enhance our ability to manage them sustainably and to respond to new and unexpected challenges, such as climate change. However, there is a lack of tools to effectively quantify institutional diversity. In this study, we conducted a systematic review of research on institutional diversity to highlight its significance, summarize existing methodological approaches for its study, and propose a framework for developing quantitative studies on the topic. Our proposed approach focuses on three key dimensions: grammatical, taxonomic, and functional. This includes quantifying the richness and diversity of grammatical components in institutional arrangements, categorizing types and taxonomies of rules, and analyzing the functional meaning and structure of institutions using analytical methods such as institutional grammar, the IAD framework, and design principles. We discuss the importance of each component, exploring the contributions of each dimension and its potential to advance our understanding of institutional diversity.

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.

The governance of interstate rivers, which flow across multiple states within a country, largely depends on the capacity of its water management institutions in coordinating state and federal actions across various water-related activities. This paper presents a quantitative method to evaluate the robustness of legal arrangements for interstate rivers in supporting coordination and facilitating collaboration among governmental actors across borders and administrative levels in managing shared water resources. Specifically, we analyze the coverage of diverse water governance affairs (measured by rule counts across action situations) and activities (indicated by the diversity of rule types) within interstate water agreements/legislation governing the rivers. Furthermore, we employ metrics of social network analysis to assess the number and content of aggregation rules from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework within these agreements, evaluating the completeness of interstate coordination channels in engaging key actors across various water management situations. By integrating these analyses, we are able to rate the degree of coordination in interstate water institutions. We demonstrate the application of this method using the case of the water governance institutions in the Yellow River Basin (YRB), China. Data, including the number and types of rules, were generated by parsing the basin’s water legislations using the Institutional Grammar (IG) and the rule concepts of the IAD framework. The findings indicate that the YRB’s degree of institutional coordination is ranked at a high level in the governance affairs of appropriation and basin planning but at a medium-low level in the affairs of administration, provision, and monitoring.