Evolution of institutional diversity in a changing world: Finding solutions in resilient agricultural systems

Project Information

RESILIENT RULES

Grant agreement ID: 101044225

DOI

10.3030/101044225

EC signature date 1 August 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 627 380,00

EU contribution

€ 2 627 380,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD DE ZARAGOZA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RESILIENT RULES (Evolution of institutional diversity in a changing world: Finding solutions in resilient agricultural systems)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Institutional diversity is considered as important as biological diversity for our long-term survival. Broadly defined as the variety of rules, norms, and strategies that societies use to govern shared resources (e.g. grazing land, forests, irrigation waters), it could enhance our ability to sustainably manage them and to cope with new and unexpected disturbances such as climate change. Surprisingly, a global quantification of institutional diversity and a full understanding of the process by which institutions adapt to new conditions are lacking, partly due to the absence of tools for the quantification of institutional diversity. This knowledge gap prevents us from responding to key questions for global sustainability such as: How much institutional diversity is there? How is it globally distributed, how is it evolving? And, more importantly, is institutional diversity and the evolution of institutions increasing our capacity to sustainably manage natural resources in our rapidly changing world?

To address these questions, RESILIENT RULES will study institutions of small-scale agricultural systems across the world by innovatively adapting tools used in life sciences for the study of biological diversity to quantify institutional diversity and respond to the following aims:

(1) To study global patterns of institutional diversity and the large-scale association between diversity of agricultural institutions and key environmental and social drivers;

(2) To analyse the evolution of agricultural institutions;

(3) To assess the contribution of institutional diversity to long-term resilience to global changes.

This novel interdisciplinary study of the spatial and temporal patterns of global institutional diversity is of major societal importance, since it will help understand the role of diversity for resilient governance of resources, create new data on agricultural institutions around the world, and open up new research opportunities in quantitative institutional diversity.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

RESILIENT RULES is an interdisciplinary research project that aims to quantify the spatial and temporal patterns of global institutional diversity (ID), i.e. the variety of rules, norms, and strategies communities use to govern shared resources in small-scale agricultural systems worldwide. The project’s final aim is to understand how ID contributes to long-term resilience in the face of global changes. To achieve these goals, RESILIENT RULES is organized in four phases:
- Phase 0 (months 1-36) develops data collection and codification processes.

- Phase 1 (starts month 25) addresses the project’s first objective: studying the patters and modulators of ID.

- Phase 2 (starts month 25) focuses on the second objective: examining the evolution of ID.

- Phase 3 (starts month 37) responds to the third objective: exploring resilience.


Phase 0 is the initial step, involving the study of 52 agricultural systems across a range of global biogeographic and cultural regions. Both written and oral institutions are collected, with oral data gathered through five stakeholder interviews. Fieldwork is conducted by a network of international research collaborators experienced in studying these communities. Before fieldwork, collaborators attend a 5-day workshop at the host institutions, with a goal of completing six workshops during Phase 0. Audio recordings are transcribed and coded according to rule typologies and institutional grammar. Achievements and progress:
- To date, 113 researchers from 89 case studies have been invited to participate in RESILIENT RULES, with 50 case studies included in the project.
- Three workshops have been completed on April (4 participants), June (3 participants), and September (8 participants), with two additional workshops scheduled on December (8 participants) and January (12 participants), and one in planning (Spring 2025), totalling 41 participants.
- Fieldwork is complete in eight agricultural communities, with seven more expected to finish by the end of 2024. These communities are located in Austria, Chile, Kenya, Nigeria, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Morocco, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zimbabwe.
- Out of 33 interviews conducted, 23 have been coded.
The initial planning anticipated that by the end of second year, research collaborators recruitment would be complete, and fieldwork would be finalized in 26 communities. Progress to date includes 96% of recruitment completion, 40% workshop completion, and 15% fieldwork completion. The time required from inviting a researcher to formalizing the collaboration and for the researcher to attend the workshop, as well as coordinating with the appropriate season for fieldwork, is causing an estimated 4-months delay in the completion of Phase 0 of the project (expected completion: month 36)

Phase 1 involves analysing coded interviews to quantify ID and understand its global patters. Achievements: Scripts to quantify and spatially analyse ID are under development.

Phase 2 focuses on analysing coded interviews to study the evolution of ID. Achievements: Coded interviews are being examined to identify institutional changes at two levels: changes in grammatical elements and changes in typology and taxonomy of rules.

In addition, the project and achievements have been disseminated through the project website (https://resilientrules.unizar.es/) in more than 10 invited talks and three international conferences.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The new taxonomy of rules, as one of the achievements of the project, has the potential to be breakthrough in analysing the diversity and structure of governance systems. Until now, the study of institutions has primarily been conducted at two levels: analysing the seven type of rules and the grammatical components of institutional statements. However, the seven type of rules are too broad to capture the vast diversity of rules used to manage common and public resources, while the institutional grammar can be overly detailed, complicating the interpretation and classification of institutional statements. The taxonomy of rules aims to create an intermediate level of analysis, enabling easier and more detailed cross-sectorial and longitudinal comparisons. Based on feedback from other researchers at international conferences and workshops, we envision a broad application of the taxonomy of rules to make a significant advance in the field of common-pool resource governance.
Additionally, the protocol for studying rules-in-use will significantly advance the research field beyond the current state-of-the-art. This was an unplanned result, but the interest generated by the analysis we are conducting in RESILIENT RULES motivated me to initiate a working group within the Institutional Grammar Research Initiative. The goal is to generalize the interview coding approach of RESILIENT RULES into a protocol that can be used across various disciplines.

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