What is the problem/issue being addressed?
Humans live in groups of huge numbers of genetically unrelated individuals due to culturally-inherited social rules (“institutions”) that structure groups and provide solutions to coordination and collective action problems. Existing approaches to understanding cooperation coming from evolutionary biology have not appreciated the importance of institutions, while studies in the social sciences have not always appreciated the evolutionary processes involved in understanding the variation we see in institutions in the world today. This project aims to synthesize these different approaches in order to answer many fundamental questions about the evolution of institutions. In this project we addressed such topics as: how have complex institutions that enable the control and coordination of large numbers of people evolved over the last 10,000 years of human history, what historical, geographical, ecological processes have shaped the evolution of inclusive institutions and productive economies, and what social and ecological processes enable the emergence and spread of large-scale, complex societies.
Why is it important for society?
All human societies are structured by institutions, and they govern the way in which people are able to come together to cooperate to solve collective action problems. Therefore, understanding how effective institutions emerge, how they are shaped, and how they are spread underpins many of the most important challenges we face in the world today. In this project, we examined why some societies have developed more “inclusive” institutions (e.g. democratic governance, the rule of law) that enable the majority of the population (not just elites) to participate in economic and political activities, which creates more productive economies. We have also examined data from community-based natural resource management projects in Kenya in order to understand how governance institutions are evolving and how these institutions are enabling people to use their natural resources in a sustainable manner.
What are the overall objectives?
In this project employed an overarching cultural evolutionary framework to address a number of important issues relating to the evolution of institutions. We developed a modelling framework and used computer simulations that examined how institutions solve cooperation problems in comparison to non-institutional processes, and investigated the social and ecological processes involved in the evolution of complex, hierarchical institutions. The project assessed how important different theories are in explaining real-world systems by applying innovative statistical techniques to analyse cross-cultural, cross-national, and historical data on institutions and other relevant variables. This integrated approach taken in this project used evolutionary theory as an organizing framework to bring together different hypotheses, disciplinary perspectives, datasets, and analytical approaches to develop to a more complete approach to investigating institutional change. In doing so we aimed to enhance our understanding of the evolutionary and ecological processes that have shaped the kinds of societies we live in today, and to explore how we might use this knowledge to address some of the most important sustainability challenges we now face.
