1
AN IHDP SCOPING REPORT
Institutional Dimensions of Global Change
by
Oran R. Young1 and Arild Underdal2
1.
2.
Institute on International Environmental Governance, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary
1. Introduction ..................................................................................
1
2. The Place of Institutions on the IHDP Agenda .....................
2
3. The Focus on Institutions ..........................................................
4
4. Critical Concerns: Effectiveness and Robustness ..................
13
5. Key IDGC Science Questions .....................................................
20
6. Links to IHDP Substantive Themes ........................................
55
7. Links to LOICZ .............................................................................
72
8. Integration with Other Global Change Models ....................
73
9. Integrative Activities .................................................................
76
10. Connections to Ongoing Programs .......................................
83
11. Next Steps ...................................................................................
87
12. Literature Cited ..........................................................................
90
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Executive Summary
Institutions - constellations of rights, rules, and relationships that
define social practices and guide interactions among those who participate in
them - have long been recognized as important determinants both of
anthropogenic activities giving rise to largescale environmental changes and
of human responses to environmental changes. Studies of disruptive
depletions of renewable resources and of severe pollution of marine and
terrestrial ecosystems, for example, regularly point to deficiencies in
prevailing structures of property or use rights as a principal source of these
problems. Similarly, many proposals aimed at eliminating emissions of CFCs
and curtailing emissions of greenhouse gases focus on changes in the rights
and rules governing the behavior of those responsible for such problems.
This Scoping Report seeks to define the Institutional Dimensions of
Global Change (IDGC) as a coherent field of study for those concerned with
the dynamics of global environmental change and to spell out a set of
analytical priorities to guide research in this field. An IDGC Science Plan
describing specific projects within this area of research is expected to be ready
by the end of 1997.
The Place of Institutions on the IHDP Agenda
The IHDP program contains two sets of projects: (1) those dealing with
substantive concerns like Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC) and
Industrial Transformation (IT) and (2) those dealing with cross-cutting themes
like institutions and individual perceptions and cognition. The intention is to
produce a set of linked studies that add substantially to our understanding of
the human dimensions of global change rather than a laundry list of unrelated
projects.
The Focus on Institutions
The IDGC project casts a wide net in setting boundaries on the
universe of social institutions to be considered in examining anthropogenic
drivers and human responses to largescale environmental change. Markets or
exchange systems are just a much a part of this universe as familiar political
systems. Institutions vary along a number of important dimensions including
number of members, functional scope, geographical domain, degree of role
differentiation, extent of formalization, density of rules and programs, nature
of associated organizations, and stage in the institutional lifecycle. The project
will devote special attention to interactions among institutions operating at
the local, national, and international levels.
Critical Concerns and Key Science Questions
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The basic architecture of the IDGC project is straightforward. It directs
attention in the first instance to studies of the effectiveness and the robustness
of social institutions, issues which constitute cutting-edge concerns among
students of institutions and which are of obvious relevance to understanding
the roles that institutions play as social drivers and as key elements of
responses to environmental changes. The report then singles out three clusters
of issues that are high on the agenda of institutional analysis at the present
time and that seem attractive as areas in which a program of studies carried
out under the auspices of the IDGC project can produce substantial added
value in efforts to improve understanding of the role of institutions in human
affairs. These are the problems of scale, interplay, and fit. The problem of scale
centers on the extent to which it is possible to scale up and scale down
propositions relating to institutions in the dimensions of space and time. The
problem of interplay involves the study of linkages or interactions among
institutions operating at different levels of social organization (vertical
interplay) as well as at the same level of social organization (horizontal
interplay). The problem of fit directs attention to the relationships between
institutions and the biophysical and social settings within which they operate.
Links to Other Global Change Projects
The IDGC project is intended to bring the prism of institutional
analysis to bear on key global change issues of concern to other core projects
and particularly LUCC, IT, and Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone
(LOICZ). In the case of LUCC, this means asking (1) How do institutions
affect patterns of land use on the part of human groups operating at various
levels of social organization? and (2) What roles do institutions play as
determinants of human responses to changes - both anthropogenic and
biogenic - in patterns of land cover? Questions relating to industrial
transformation include (3) What roles do institutions play as determinants of
macro-level changes in economic systems over time? and (4) How do
institutions affect processes of materialization and dematerialization at
different levels of social organization? Similar questions pertaining to LOICZ
ask (5) How do institutions affect the nature and distribution of human
activities taking place in the coastal zone? and (6) What roles do institutions
play as determinants of human responses to largescale natural forces (e.g.
hurricanes, tidal waves, ENSO phenomena)?
Integration with Other Global Change Models
A project on the institutional dimensions of global change must
endeavor to frame findings in terms that facilitate efforts to integrate these
findings with other global change projects, especially those carried out by
natural scientists. This means formulating propositions in quantitative terms
wherever possible and employing longer time frames than is usual in the
social sciences. It also suggests making use of the analytical toolbox of formal
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modeling generally and the "rational choice" paradigm more specifically as an
integrating framework for IDGC studies.
Integrative Activities
Several cross-cutting issues of a conceptual and methodological nature
require attention in order to maximize the prospects for producing
cumulative results from the IDGC project. The most important of these
involve (1) devising a common language to facilitate communication
regarding institutions among analysts coming from different social science
disciplines, (2) achieving analytic harmonization or calibration as a basis for
empirical studies of institutions, (3) developing databases to support
comparative empirical research on institutions, and (4) comparing the results
produced by individual studies of institutions in the interests of building a
collection of design principles.
Programmatic Links and Next Steps
The IDGC project is predicated on the observation that a considerable
volume of high quality research on institutions has already been carried out,
is in progress, or is presently on the drawing boards. The major goals of the
project are thus to (1) integrate, refine and extend existing findings that are
relevant to global environmental change, (2) stimulate and coordinate
research efforts aimed at filling important gaps and pursuing particularly
promising areas of study, and (3) bring this intellectual capital to bear on the
concerns of projects like LUCC, IT, and LOICZ. To this end those responsible
for the IDGC project will consult regularly with the relevant science
community in moving from this Scoping Report to the formulation of a more
detailed Science Plan. An IDGC Scientific Planning Committee will coordinate
this effort with the goal of producing a Science Plan for the project by the end
of 1997.
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1. Introduction3
Institutions - constellations of rights, rules, and relationships that
define social practices and guide interactions among those who participate in
them - have been recognized as an important factor in understanding both the
anthropogenic drivers of global environmental changes and human responses
to such changes from the earliest days of the International Human
Dimensions Programme (IHDP).4 During its first several years of operation,
however, the IHDP was unable to develop a project focusing specifically on
the role of social institutions. In 1995, the programme's Scientific Committee
(SC) decided to take action in this area and enlisted the two of us to take the
lead in exploring prospects for the development of a core project on the
Institutional Dimensions of Global Change (IDGC). This Scoping Report
constitutes a major step along the road toward that goal. Assuming that the
IHDP SC approves the report and asks us to proceed, the next step will be the
framing of an IDGC Science Plan. Work on this plan is expected to be the top
priority in this area during 1997.
The basic architecture of the IDGC core project is straightforward. We
seek to answer questions of interest to other global change projects, including
Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC), Industrial Transformation (IT),
and Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ), by analyzing
factors that determine the effectiveness and the robustness of social
institutions and, more specifically, by focusing on the problems of scale,
interplay, and fit which constitute cutting-edge concerns among students of
3.
Although many people have made suggestions that have proven helpful in the preparation of this
report, we wish to offer particular thanks to those who assisted us by participating in a two-day
workshop on the institutional dimensions of global change in January 1996: Clark Gibson, Harold
Jacobson, Robert Keohane, Leslie King, and Gail Osherenko.
4. Prior to 1996, the programme was known as the Human Dimensions Programme (HDP). With the
addition of ICSU as one of the programme's sponsors, however, the name was changed to IHDP. For
convenience, we refer to the IHDP throughout this report.
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institutions at this time. With respect to LUCC, we ask: (1) How do
institutions affect patterns of land use on the part of human groups at various
levels of social organization? and (2) What roles do institutions play as
determinants of human responses to both natural and anthropogenic changes
in patterns of land cover? In the case of IT, we want to know (3) What roles do
institutions play as determinants of macro-level changes in economic systems
over time? and (4) How do institutions influence processes of materialization
and dematerialization of industrial production both across societies operating
at the same level of social organization and across levels of social
organization? Turning to LOICZ, we enquire (5) How do institutions affect
the nature and distribution of human activities taking place in the coastal
zone? and (6) What roles do institutions play as determinants of human
responses to natural disasters or extreme natural events (e.g. hurricanes, tidal
waves, ENSO phenomena, sea-level rise) impacting the coastal zone?
2. The Place of Institutions on the IHDP Agenda
In developing the research agenda of the International Human
Dimensions Program, the various Steering Committees have initiated
planning activities in several fields. For analytical purposes, it is useful to
distinguish among four kinds of themes that have been covered in these
efforts:
• substantive areas of physical change and/or human activities causing such
change. Major topics here include land use and land cover change,
energy production and consumption, and water use.
• social and technological processes determining the human impact on the
environment
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(and,
in
turn,
being
themselves
affected
by
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environmental change). In this category, most attention has been
devoted to demographic change and industrial transformation.
• actor attributes or system properties shaping human activities. At the
micro-level, attention has focused on individual perceptions, beliefs,
attitudes, etc.; at the meso- and macro-level, on social institutions.
• social values at stake:, including human health, security/peace, and - at
least implicit in most contexts - sustainability.
Figure 1 identifies the most important of these themes and illustrates the
relationships among them.
____________________________
Figure 1 about here
_____________________________
The project outlined in this report is premised on the assumption that
institutions can be treated as a cross-cutting theme in the sense that
institutional factors are important determinants of human behavior in
virtually all areas of substantive interest to IHDP - be it energy production or
land and water use. Moreover, understanding how institutions develop,
operate, change, and decline can safely be counted among the core concerns
of the social sciences. As such, the theme has considerable appeal to a wide
range of social scientists - from economists to anthropologists and from
“mainstreamers” to critical “dissenters." Located at the intersection between
the core concerns of social science and the interest in understanding the
human dimensions of global environmental change, an IHDP project on the
role of institutions should meet a dual challenge. It must be able to tap into
the fund of general knowledge that social scientists have accumulated about
various types of institutions. At the same time, it must link the general study
of institutions to a specific substantive setting, notably that of important
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problems of global environmental change and related human behavior. It
must, in other words, mobilize prominent social scientists to bring their
knowledge and analytical tools to bear upon major substantive problems of
global environmental change.
One important way to accomplish this objective, we believe, is to
organize the IHDP agenda in terms of a matrix, in which projects focusing on
substantive areas of environmental change and related human behavior (e.g.
LUCC) and projects dealing with cross-cutting themes, such as institutions,
intersect in strategically designed joint modules focusing on issues like the
role of a particular kind of institution (e.g. property rights systems) in a
particular setting (e.g. land use). If we succeed in forging these links, we think
a core project on the role of institutions can become an integral and important
component of the overall IHDP portfolio.
3. The Focus on Institutions
The overall objective of the emerging core project on the Institutional
Dimensions of Global Change is to determine the proportion of the variance
both in anthropogenic impacts on large environmental systems and in human
responses to global environmental changes that can be explained in terms of
the operation of social institutions. Institutions constitute only one of several
categories of social drivers that are relevant to global environmental change.
Others include material conditions, like prevailing technology, and cognitive
forces, like belief systems and values (Commoner 1972, White 1967). There is
no need to argue that institutions are more important than other types of
social drivers. Rather, the goals of this effort are to separate out institutional
forces from other social drivers in order to pinpoint the proportion of the
variance in human actions relating to global change that can be shown to flow
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from the operation of institutions and, subsequently, to explore how
institutions interact with other social drivers to produce anthropogenic
impacts and to determine human responses to environmental change.
3.1 The Nature of Institutions
Institutions are human artifacts that are pervasive at all levels of social
organization. Familiar examples include systems of property rights that guide
the actions of individual users of land and natural resources and legislative
arrangements that guide the process of making collective choices about
publicly owned lands or about regulations to be imposed on the actions of
individual land owners. The rapidly growing literature on the "tragedy of the
commons," including studies of the reasons why the tragedy does not occur in
many
social
settings
featuring
common
property
arrangements,
is
fundamentally a debate about the role of institutions as determinants of
human actions affecting nature and natural resources (Hardin and Baden eds.
1977, McCay and Acheson eds. 1987). Similarly, recent debates regarding the
extent to which public lands should be transferred into various forms of
private property are premised on the idea that institutional arrangements are
key factors in determining the outcomes resulting from human uses of nature
and natural resources (Nelson 1995).
This report casts a wide net in setting boundaries on the universe of
social institutions to be considered in examining the impacts of human actions
on largescale environmental systems and the responses of humans to
environmental changes. Various types of markets or exchange systems are
just as much a part of this universe as familiar political arrangements. Not
only do exchange relationships themselves rest on well-understood rules but
also markets cannot operate effectively in the absence of associated
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institutional arrangements dealing with contracts, financing, patents, liability,
and exchange rates. Similarly, institutions encompass both formal and
informal social practices. Thus, the common property systems developed in
smallscale, traditional societies on the basis of trial and error and in the
absence of explicit agreements about codes of conduct are no less important as
members of the universe of institutions as the formal arrangements spelled
out in legislative enactments at the national level and international
conventions or treaties. As anthropologists and sociologists have often
observed, moreover, institutions in operation or, as some analysts would put
it, rules in use frequently include a complex mix of formal arrangements and
informal practices. Over time, rules in use may move well beyond or away
from formally articulated constitutive agreements. Yet these living practices
are generally well understood by those whose actions they guide.
Institutions come in many sizes and shapes. Both local arrangements
dealing with the management of irrigation systems and international
arrangements pertaining to transboundary lakes and river basins, for
example, are institutions that are narrowly focused in spatial and functional
terms. Other social practices, like systems of commonfield agriculture in
traditional societies or the international rules governing human uses of
marine areas, are cast in broader terms. It is apparent as well that in a world
involving the operation of many distinct institutions at the same time, there is
a need to recognize the existence of a variety of linkages among institutions
that are differentiable from one another but that affect each other in
significant ways (Young 1996). Because institutions are complex, students of
these arrangements have exhibited an understandable tendency to focus on
specific institutions as if they were stand-alone arrangements. But it is clear
that institutional linkages - both intended and unintended - constitute an
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increasingly important phenomenon that will require increased attention in
the future.
Institutions understood as social practices are not to be confused with
organizations treated as material entities possessing offices, personnel,
equipment, budgets, and legal personality (Young 1994a). British Petroleum is
an organization, but the world trade system embodied in the provisions of the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and now the World Trade
Organization (WTO) is an institution. Similarly, the United States Department
of Interior is an organization, while the regimes governing mining or the
harvesting of timber on public lands are institutions. The purpose of drawing
this distinction is not to argue that institutions are more important than
organizations or vice versa. On the contrary, the distinction opens up an
important research program focusing on the roles that organizations play in
the formation of social institutions and the factors that determine whether and
to what extent organizations are needed to administer institutions once they
have been put in place.
Institutions vary along a number of important dimensions. These
include number of members, functional scope, geographical domain, degree
of role differentiation, extent of formalization, density of rules and programs,
nature of associated organizations, and stage in the institutional lifecycle. It is
important to note as well that institutions are not static; they change
continuously over time in response to both endogenous and exogenous
forces. In many cases, this involves the emergence of informal understandings
that supplement or, in some instances, modify the formal rules and programs
spelled out in constitutive documents. Under the circumstances, it is helpful
to use the phrase social practices to refer to the ensembles of formal
arrangements and informal understandings that are understood by the actors
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involved and that together make up rules in use or institutions as they
actually operate on the ground.
3.2 Institutional Tasks and Types
Preoccupied with the search for solutions to collective-action problems,
many analysts have simply assumed that institutions are sets of rules or codes
of conduct whose purpose is to overcome the negative consequences of
individualistic behavior in interactive situations (Schelling 1978). The concern
with institutional devices that smallscale societies have developed to avoid
the tragedy of the commons illustrates this proposition clearly (Ostrom 1990).
So also does the tendency to model arms races, trade wars, and environmental
problems occurring at the macro-level in terms of analytic constructs like the
prisoner's dilemma or chicken. In all these cases, the problem is to reach
agreement, whether explicitly or tacitly, on regulatory arrangements and then
to find ways of ensuring that most participants comply with these rules most
of the time (Mitchell 1994, Chayes and Chayes 1995).
Such regulatory arrangements constitute an important category of
institutions at all levels of social organization. But they do not exhaust the
category of institutions or, perhaps more accurately, the range of
differentiable functions or tasks that institutions perform. Institutions often
concentrate on procedural tasks in the sense that they provide mechanisms
through which parties can make collective choices about matters of common
concern (Hayek 1979). Some such choices are recurrent (e.g. setting total
allowable catches of living resources on an annual basis). Others are episodic
(e.g. designating certain species as threatened or endangered as the need
arises). Still others are unique in the sense that they occur only once (e.g.
deciding whether to dam a river to generate energy or irrigate land). But
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unlike regulatory arrangements, which feature rules (including prohibitions,
requirements, and permissions) intended to apply uniformly to well-defined
categories or classes of situations, procedural mechanisms allow the members
of an institutional arrangement to cope with common problems on a case-bycase basis and to address new issues that were unforeseen at the time the
arrangement was created.
To these categories of regulatory and procedural institutions, we must
add programmatic and generative arrangements. Programmatic institutions
are mechanisms intended to allow groups of actors to pool their resources or
coordinate their efforts in the interests of planning and carrying out projects
that none would be able to mount successfully on its own. The building and
maintenance of largescale infrastructure (e.g. transboundary flood control or
irrigation systems) or the establishment of joint development zones (e.g.
coordinated arrangements to allow for the exploitation of oil or gas deposits
in an efficient manner) exemplify this type of arrangement. The essential
problem here is to reach agreement on designs for common projects and then
to assign well-defined roles to participants in the coordinated activities that
follow.
Generative institutions, by contrast, are arrangements that focus on
efforts to foster understanding of complex problems and to build up the
intellectual capital needed to cope with them. Often, this is a matter of
devising an analytic perspective, like the ways of thinking we associate with
the ideas of sustainable yields, ecosystems management, and critical loads.
The articulation of such a perspective or, as many would say, guiding
discourse frequently plays a role in setting agendas and in building
constituencies that support the ongoing development of social practices
(Litfin 1994). In this connection, institutions can function not only as sources
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of the intellectual capital needed to deal with the problem at hand but also as
producers of discourses that diffuse from their origins into other issue areas.
Not surprisingly, the application of such systems of thought to areas outside
their original domain is often controversial.
The distinctions among regulatory, procedural, programmatic, and
generative arrangements are analytic in nature. The same institution may
perform two or more of these tasks at the same time. Institutions addressing
the consumptive use of marine living resources, for instance, may seek to (1)
introduce new ways of thinking about the problem at hand (e.g. newly
emerging ideas associated with the concepts of large marine ecosystems and
marine biological conservation), (2) lay down rules involving gear types,
seasons, or protected areas, (3) provide a procedure for setting annual harvest
levels, and (4) set in motion joint projects intended to rebuild depleted stocks
or degraded habitats. Nonetheless, many institutions stress one or another of
these tasks, leaving others to be handled by different arrangements that may
or may not be organized in a complementary fashion.
Beyond this, it is pertinent to note that institutions may play broader
identitive or constitutive roles in addition to the utilitarian tasks outlined in
the preceding paragraphs. Mainstream thinking about social institutions
assumes the prior existence of actors possessing a clear sense of their own
identities and the interests flowing from these identities. Such actors will be
motivated to create institutional arrangements when they find that
proceeding individualistically leads to joint losses or an inability to reap joint
gains. On this account, institutions are devices formed be self-interested actors
to solve or at least ameliorate collective-action problems (e.g. security
dilemmas, trade wars, tragedies of the commons). An identitive or
constitutive perspective, on the other hand, assumes that institutions play a
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major role in defining the interests of participants and even in shaping their
identities. Members of the European Union, for example, are required to
make significant adjustments in their domestic systems in order to meet the
requirements of membership in the union. On this account, institutions have
formative effects on their members rather than the other way around (Wendt
1987, Wendt 1992).
3.3 The Institutional Agenda
Those seeking to understand the operation of institutions have directed
attention to the nature of the actors participating in such arrangements, the
character of the interactions among the actors, and the physical, biological and
social domains within which these interactions take place. With regard to the
actors, there are lively debates concerning the relevance of such variables as
the total number of actors, the degree of heterogeneity among the set of
participants, and the extent to which participants behave as unitary actors or
as collective entities (Keohane and Ostrom eds. 1995). Discussions of the
relationships among actors range from analyses of the effects of role
differentiation to assessments of the differences among interactions that are
primarily regulatory, procedural, programmatic, or generative. Domain refers
both to social considerations, like the extent and nature of feelings of
community among the members of an institution, and to biological and
physical considerations, like the population dynamics of stocks of fish or
animals whose use on the part of humans gives rise to the institutions in the
first place. The study of these matters constitutes a common agenda for those
interested in the role of social institutions, and analysts representing a number
of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, law, political science, and
sociology, have made major contributions to our understanding of the effects
of variations along all of these dimensions.
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In recent years, a movement commonly described as the "new
institutionalism" has emerged and begun to play an important role in
integrating the efforts of students of institutions representing most of the
social science disciplines (Furubotn and Richter eds. 1991, March and Olsen
1989, Powell and DiMaggio eds. 1991, Rutherford 1994, Young 1994a).
Although there is considerable variation among the different strands of this
movement, its hallmarks are a focus on rules in use in contrast to formalistic
perspectives on institutions and a clear distinction between institutions
construed as social practices and organizations treated as material entities
with offices, personnel, equipment, budgets, and so forth. The leaders of this
movement have sought to shed light on (1) the processes through which
institutions form or become established, (2) the effectiveness of institutions or
the extent to which they impact the course of collective outcomes in various
social settings, and (3) the dynamics of institutions or the forces determining
both the robustness of social practices and the ways in which they change
over time. It is too early to make a definitive assessment of the contributions
that this "new institutionalism" will yield in efforts to broaden and deepen our
understanding of social institutions. But it is already clear that this movement
offers an attractive vehicle for analysts from all the social sciences to work
together on a research program that is of interest to all but that is the property
of none. It follows that the "new institutionalism" can provide a helpful
framework for organizing our efforts to understand the role of institutions as
determinants of anthropogenic drivers and human responses to global
environmental changes.
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4. Critical Concerns: Effectiveness and Robustness
Social science research has asked a wide range of questions about
institutions. In the study of global environmental change, however, most of
the interest in the role of institutions centers on two critical concerns:
effectiveness and robustness. To play a significant role as anthropogenic
drivers or as determinants of human responses to environmental changes
institutions must be effective or, in other words, make a difference in shaping
the flow of collective outcomes in various social systems. A necessary, though
not sufficient, condition for institutions to make a difference is some capacity
to endure or, in other words, to achieve a significant measure of robustness.
4.1 Institutional Effectiveness
An institution is effective to the extent that it successfully performs a
particular (set of) function(s) or solves a particular problem.5 A taxonomy of
functions or tasks that institutions can perform has already been suggested in
Section 3.2. In some contexts, effectiveness can be assessed in relation to a
specific problem rather than a more generic function. Thus, an institution is
often said to be effective to the extent that it solves or alleviates the problem
that motivated its establishment.6 As we shall see, both of these approaches
have their pitfalls and limitations, but the point to be made here is simply that
institutional effectiveness can not be meaningfully assessed in the abstract;
5.
In studies adopting a systems perspective, the concept of "efficiency" is sometimes used instead of
"effectiveness" (Easton 1965). The former directs attention to the relationship between
accomplishments and costs, while effectiveness is most often defined in terms of "gross" achievement.
6. In some instances, we distinguish between the official purpose of an institution and the private
motives that individual actors have for contributing to its establishment and operation. The regime
dealing with long-range transboundary transport of pollutants in Europe, for example, owes its
existence in part to the interest of the former Soviet Union in promoting detente through the
development of new mechanisms for East-West collaboration.
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any assessment of effectiveness will have to be related to a specific (set of)
function(s) or to a particular problem.
Evaluating effectiveness requires comparing something - let us
provisionally refer to this object simply as "the institution" - against some
standard of success or accomplishment. More specifically, any assessment of
effectiveness will have to cope with at least three main questions: (1) What
precisely is the object to be evaluated? (2) Against which standard of success
is this object to be evaluated? and (3) What kind(s) of measurement operations
do we have to perform in order to be able to attribute a certain level of
effectiveness to an institution? We have both wrestled with these questions in
some detail elsewhere (see e.g. Underdal 1992, Young 1994a). Suffice it here to
offer just a few remarks to indicate the kinds of considerations involved.
Regarding the object to be evaluated, the most important distinction
seems to be that between the formal norms, principles and rules that
constitute the institution itself and the set of consequences flowing from its
operation. In the context of environmental change, the latter may be further
specified by drawing a distinction between consequences in the form of
changes in human behavior and consequences that materialize as changes in
the state of the biophysical environment itself. We have no straightforward
method for inferring behavioral change from formal characteristics of the
institution itself. Actors sometimes respond by making ingenious adjustments
that are hard to predict or by engaging in more or less flagrant noncompliance. Nor is the relationship between change in human behavior and
change in the biophysical environment always well understood. By
implication, the conclusion we end up with may depend critically upon which
of these objects our assessment refers to.
Defining an evaluation standard involves at least two important steps.
One is to determine the point of reference against which actual achievement is
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to be compared. The other is to determine a metric of measurement. There are
basically two points of reference that are commonly used in this context. One
is the hypothetical state of affairs that would have come about had the
institution not existed. The other is some notion of “optimum” or the “ideal”
solution. The former is clearly the notion we have in mind when we ask
whether a particular institution “makes a difference;” the latter is the
appropriate perspective if we ask to what extent a particular problem is in fact
solved or a particular purpose accomplished under present arrangements.
Again, the score we would give to a particular institution may be highly
sensitive to the choice of reference point. The same can be said about the
choice of metric. In the study of environmental change, institutions are
sometimes evaluated in terms of social welfare and sometimes in terms of
ecological concepts such as “sustainability.” Failure to specify which of these
(or other) standards is to be used can lead to confusion or misunderstandings.
If we conceive of institutional effectiveness in terms of relative
improvement compared to the situation that would have existed in its
absence, we need to answer the hypothetical question of what would have
happened had the institution not existed. Needless to say, this can be an
intriguing
methodological
challenge.
Determining
the
maximum
(“optimum”) that can be accomplished in a given setting may be even more
difficult. Looming over all these considerations is the fact that any measure of
effectiveness has causal inferences embedded within it. To say that an
institution is effective in any of the senses mentioned is to assert that it is
causally significant as a determinant of the behavior of at least some of the
actors involved (Levy, Young, and Zuern 1995). Not surprisingly, therefore,
much of the time and energy of students of institutional effectiveness goes
into efforts to pin down and demonstrate to skeptics the causal force of
institutions operative in various spheres of human behavior.
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4.2 Institutional Robustness
An institution is robust to the extent that it is able to cope with
disturbances and survive stress. The ability of an institution to survive is - like
that of any species in the biosphere - related to its ability to adapt to changing
(task) environments. The relationship between robustness and adaptability is,
however, a complex one, and raises intricate analytical questions at two
levels. First, there is the conceptual issue of what has to remain constant for an
institution to "survive." The conventional answer has been to define survival
in terms of persistence of "essential" or "constitutive" characteristics - "those
that best define the way in which the system operates" (Easton 1965: 92). We
can easily see, however, that the distinction between “essential” and “nonessential” features can be difficult to draw in a given empirical setting. Thus,
while a full-scale transition from a system of common ownership of land to
one based on private property no doubt qualifies as a change in an essential
characteristic of the property rights system, it is less obvious how to evaluate
a marginal change affecting, say, ten per cent of the land owned by a
community. Second, there is the empirical question of the causal link between
adaptability and robustness. To what extent does the ability to adapt "nonconstitutive" elements to changes in its task environment increase the chances
that the "core" of an institution will survive? Put differently, what is the
"optimal" level of adaptability for a particular kind of institution?7 These are
hard questions to answer, but it is abundantly clear that extreme rigidity is
rarely if ever a good recipe for survival. The optimal level of institutional
adaptability is well above zero, but also well below the theoretical maximum
(see below).
7.
Since robustness is intimately related to change, any enquiry into the sources of institutional change
will also shed some light on the sources of robustness (Campbell, Hollingsworth, and Lindberg eds.
1991).
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Robustness, as defined above, has both an internal and an external
dimension. An institution is robust, in the internal sense, if it exhibits a
pronounced tendency to return to some equilibrium state in the wake of
perturbations or distortions brought about by its own operations. An
economic system that can weather severe business cycles and return to a more
productive state is a robust system. So also is a democratic polity that can
withstand long periods of dominance by a single party or faction without
degenerating into despotism. External robustness, by contrast, refers to the
capacity of a system to adjust to changes in its task environment or the
broader setting within which it operates without losing its defining or
essential characteristics. Fishery regimes that cannot tolerate significant
changes in the technology used to harvest fish (e.g. the advent of the stern
trawler) are lacking in robustness in this sense. So also are management
regimes that prove incapable of adjusting to substantial changes in the
abundance of stocks attributable to physical or biological forces. In general,
there is no reason to assume that the two dimensions of robustness will vary
together. Institutions that are highly robust in internal terms sometimes
collapse suddenly in the wake of changes in the environment within which
they operate, and vice versa.
Robustness is a complex variable that is difficult to measure in any
straightforward manner. Repeated surprises regarding the collapse of
seemingly robust systems (e.g. the Soviet Union during 1990-91) make it clear
that we are often better at assessing robustness in ex post rather than in ex ante
terms (Gaddis 1992/1993). Similar comments are in order about the
persistence of systems that appear to many observers to be on their last legs.
In one respect, however, robustness is a more tractable variable than
effectiveness. Efforts to measure robustness do not require the sorts of causal
inferences that complicate the assessment of effectiveness. The position of a
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given social institution on the scale of robustness can, in other words, be
measured in terms of the relationship between stress and persistence. This is
by no means an easy exercise, but there is a reasonable hope that we will be
able to assess robustness in ordinal terms or in terms of distinctions such as
low, medium, and high.
Let us conclude this section by adding a few words about the
relationship between effectiveness and robustness. Other things being equal,
(perceived) effectiveness seems to be a source of strength and will therefore
enhance the robustness of an institution. In the long run, a certain minimum
of effectiveness will probably be a necessary condition for survival.
Robustness does, however, depend also on other factors, among which
legitimacy appears to be the most important. The higher the general
legitimacy of an institution, the less vulnerable it will be to temporary
performance "failures," and the longer it can survive even more lasting
problems of "malfunctioning." The impact of robustness on effectiveness is
somewhat more complex. To be effective an institution must be able to
survive encounters with the kind(s) of problems it has been established to
solve or alleviate. In this particular sense, at least, effectiveness requires
robustness. It is equally obvious, however, that effectiveness can be enhanced
by the ability to learn from experience and to adapt constructively to new
challenges. For example, a government that is capable of adjusting its fiscal
policies in response to changes in the domestic economy or in the
international financial system is likely to be more successful in achieving its
basic objectives than one that fails to adjust. The bottom line is that
effectiveness seems to require a particular combination of resilience and
adaptability. Determining the optimal balance more precisely can be a
difficult task, but the basic notion itself can at least serve as a heuristic device
pointing us towards a fertile area of research.
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5. Key IDGC Science Questions
A core project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Change must
focus, at one and the same time, on questions that are of obvious relevance to
understanding the roles humans play in the dynamics of large biophysical
systems and that are at the cutting edge of thinking about institutions more
generally. It must also seek to build on the efforts of those whose work on
institutions does not flow from an interest in global environmental change.
Bearing these considerations in mind, we propose that an IHDP core project
on institutions pay particular attention to three sets of cross-cutting analytic
concerns that promise to shed light on the determinants of the effectiveness
and robustness of institutions and that call for collaborative, interdisciplinary
research of the type that a core project can stimulate and coordinate. These
concerns include: the problem of scale, the problem of interplay among
differentiable but related institutions, and the problem of fit between
institutions and the biophysical and social domains within which they
operate.
5.1 The Problem of Scale
The problem of scale centers on the transferability of both empirical
generalizations and causal inferences from one level to another in the
dimensions of space and time. Thus, scaling up in space is a matter of
applying findings derived from the analysis of smallscale or micro-level
systems to meso-scale or even macro-scale systems. Conversely, scaling down
is a process of bringing findings about largescale systems to bear on the
analysis of meso-level or micro-level systems. The problem associated with
scale arises from the fact that while scaling up and scaling down are relatively
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straightforward procedures under some conditions, this is not the case under
other conditions. It is therefore an important challenge both to identify
conditions under which generalizing across scales is hazardous and to
develop procedures for adapting propositions and models to allow for scaling
up or down in such cases.
Natural scientists have long regarded the problem of scale as critical to
determining the scope of the validity of propositions about biophysical
systems and to developing integrated theories about such systems (Holling,
1992, Ehleringer and Field eds. 1993). By contrast, the problem of scale has
received comparatively little attention from social scientists. Yet it is easy to
see that this problem is just as relevant to the study of social or human
systems as it is to the analysis of biophysical systems (Young 1994b). The
assessment of the effectiveness of social institutions as determinants of
collective outcomes constitutes a clear case in point. We want to know, for
example, whether and to what extent the causal mechanisms through which
institutions affect behavior at one level of social organization, such as
smallscale or micro-level societies, also play key roles at other levels of social
organization, including national (meso-level) societies and international
(macro-level) society and vice versa. Similar comments are in order about the
robustness of social practices. We want to identify similarities and differences
in the determinants of institutional robustness and in the dynamics of social
institutions operating at various levels of social organization.
One obvious matter of interest in this realm concerns the relative
weight of endogenous factors and exogenous forces as determinants of
institutional
effectiveness.
Students
of
micro-level
and
meso-level
arrangements typically take it for granted that institutions make a difference
and set about analyzing those features of institutions themselves that account
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for variations in the results institutions produce. To some extent this is a
matter of the fit between a particular institution and the problem it is created
to solve, a subject to which we return in a subsequent section of this report.
But beyond this, the focus on endogenous determinants of effectiveness leads
naturally to a consideration of design principles. A particularly well-known
example of such thinking, based on an extensive analysis of micro-level
systems, can be seen in Ostrom's discussion of long-enduring common
property arrangements (Ostrom 1990). No doubt, there is room for discussion
regarding the persuasiveness of these principles at the micro-level. But our
question in this connection concerns the extent to which these principles
(summarized in Table 1) can be scaled up to apply to meso-level and,
especially, macro-level situations (McGinnis and Ostrom 1992).
Consider the following questions about specific principles. It may be
possible for most affected actors to participate in "modifying the operational
rules" at the micro-level. But how can this condition
_________________________
Table 1 about here
__________________________
be met at the meso-level, and is it sufficient to grant all member states (as
opposed to those whose behavior is at stake) the right to participate in
making such decisions at the macro-level? Do sanctions actually work at the
national or meso-level in the sense that they constitute a serious deterrent to
those who experience incentives to cheat, and does it make any sense to think
about a system of graduated sanctions at the macro-level? Is "rapid access to
low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts" a requirement that those responsible
for meso-level or macro-level institutions can meet? More generally, how do
these principles, derived from a study of the behavior of appropriators of
common pool resources, apply to the behavior of polluters or actors who are
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injecting wastes of various types into ecosystems in contrast to appropriating
or withdrawing resources from a common pool? The point of raising these
questions is not to cast doubt on the validity of the conclusions about local or
micro-level institutions that Ostrom and her colleagues have reached. Rather,
our purpose is to explore variations in the processes operating at different
levels of social organization that may affect the transferability of propositions
from one level to another.
Students of international relations who focus on macro-level systems,
by contrast, have devoted more attention to identifying exogenous
determinants of institutional effectiveness. They ask whether certain
conditions relating to the distribution of material resources, the configuration
of interests, and the content of ideas are required in order to allow institutions
to operate effectively. A favorite theme of this line of thinking concerns the
extent to which the presence of a dominant actor in the sense of an actor able
to control a preponderance of the material bases of power in the relevant issue
area is needed in order for international regimes to succeed in solving
problems (Keohane 1984). But other arguments pertaining to exogenous
forces are easy enough to formulate. Some analysts, looking to the
configuration of interests among the relevant actors, emphasize the
importance of the existence of one or more equilibria yielding Pareto optimal
outcomes - as in paradigm know as battle of the sexes - as a determinant of
the effectiveness of institutions (Snidal 1985). Others direct attention to the
convergence of ideas (Cooper 1989) or the presence of an "epistemic
community" (i.e. a group of experts possessing both a common interpretation
of the nature of the problem and an agreed prescription for solving it) as a
condition for success (Haas ed. 1992).
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From one point of view, these arguments regarding exogenous forces
diminish the role that institutions play as determinants of collective outcomes
in interactive situations. Alternatively, however, we can think of them as
propositions about intervening variables that limit but do not eliminate the
role of institutions treated as independent variables. But be that as it may, the
issue before us here is whether these arguments about macro-level systems
are transferable to the study of meso-level and micro-level systems. Although
the details undoubtedly differ from one level to another, there is a sense in
which arguments of this kind raise age-old issues at every level of social
organization.
The
underlying
question
is
whether
institutions
are
epiphenomena or surface manifestations of deeper social forces, like the
distribution of power or the grip of dominant ideas, rather than determinants
of behavior in their own right. Although this concern is currently voiced with
particular force by those who study macro-level systems (Strange 1983), the
core issue is much the same at every level of social organization. Just as
realists tend to deny or diminish the significance of international regimes,
Marxian analysts will see meso-level and micro-level institutions as
reflections of the interests of a ruling class, and those whose thinking is
Platonic or Hegelian in origin will view institutions as surface manifestations
of prevailing worldviews or ideologies. Our purpose at this stage is not to say
whether any of these analytic perspectives is right or wrong. But it does seem
apparent that there is room for a mutually beneficial dialogue among students
of institutions at all levels regarding the role of these exogenous forces.
Another subject of interest to those who think about the relationship
between scale and effectiveness centers on issues of equity or fairness.
Analysts - particularly economists - who focus on meso-level systems often
assess institutions in terms of their implications for the pursuit of efficiency
(Dorfman and Dorfman eds. 1977). For the most part, they either ignore
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questions of fairness on the grounds that the consideration of such matters
raises intractable questions about interpersonal comparisons of utility or
argue that it is more important to think in terms of processes that are fair than
in terms of consequentialist conceptions of equity that pose all the difficulties
associated with the idea of social welfare (Nozick 1974). Many students of
micro-level systems, by contrast, argue that fairness is an essential ingredient
of effectiveness in the sense that any institutional arrangement dealing with
common pool resources "must somehow win agreement from both rich and
poor members of the community in order to keep either group from
sabotaging the system" (McKean 1992: 275). For their part, mainstream writers
on macro-level systems often deny that considerations of equity or fairness
play any role at all. They view interests backed by power as the dominant
force in international society, a perspective that leaves little room for any
argument suggesting a link between institutional effectiveness and equity.
What are we to make of these divergent points of view regarding the
role of equity or fairness as a determinant of institutional effectiveness? Do
they reflect fundamental differences in the nature of institutions or the roles
they play from one level of social organization to another? Without denying
the existence of relevant differences, it is possible to raise some pointed
questions about these divergent points of view. Although it is certainly true
that the identification of social welfare functions is fraught with analytic
difficulties, there is no denying the importance that actors in meso-level
systems attach to considerations of fairness and to the distributive
consequences of institutional arrangements more generally. For their part,
even the most powerful actors at the macro-level often find that it is easier
and ultimately cheaper to provide weaker participants in ongoing
institutional arrangements with some sense of equity regarding the outcomes
than to coerce participation on the part of unwilling actors on a continuous
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basis. On the other hand, there is little evidence that micro-level arrangements
dealing with common pool resources can be counted on to yield equitable
outcomes in distributive terms; asymmetries in the power resources of
participants and incentives to capture the lion's share of the gains from
cooperation appear to be just as prevalent at this level as they are at other
levels of social organization. The point of these observations is that apparent
differences in the role of equity or fairness across levels of social organization
may be artifacts of our analytic perspectives in contrast to real effects of scale.
Until we take seriously the problem of scale in this connection and make a
concerted effort to assess the transferability of propositions from one level of
social organization to another, we will be unable to speak with authority
about the links between considerations of equity or fairness and the
effectiveness of social institutions.
A third issue of interest with regard to connections between scale and
effectiveness centers on the social settings within which specific institutions
operate. One common concern in this realm involves the relationship between
institutions and what is generally referred to as community. Many analysts of
micro-level systems see social institutions as culturally embedded structures
and treat the existence of a sense of community among their members as a
necessary condition for the effectiveness of specific institutions. In a
commentary on Ostrom's work, for example, Singleton and Taylor (1992: 309)
argue
that
a
group's
capacity
to
solve
collective-action
problems
endogenously (i.e. in the absence of an external public authority able and
willing to impose rules) is a function of the degree to which the group
"approximates a community of mutually vulnerable actors." In her response to
this argument, Ostrom (1992) acknowledges the importance of community in
helping to devise effective arrangements to manage the use of common pool
resources. But what exactly is a community in this sense, and can this
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argument about the importance of community be generalized across levels of
social organization? Singleton and Taylor (1992: 315) use the term community
in a very specific sense, which they acknowledge may have a limited range of
applicability to real-world situations. Others have used the term in many
different ways and, more often than not, in ways that are too imprecise to
allow for a serious assessment of arguments in which community figures as a
variable. At the same time, Singleton and Taylor argue that their analysis can
be generalized to all situations involving collective-action problems, a
position implying that it is possible to scale up and scale down with regard to
propositions concerning the role of community as a determinant of the
effectiveness of social institutions treated as responses to collective-action
problems. This suggests that there is a need to review the rather casual use of
the concept on the part of students of international society (Claude 1988) and
to agree on a definition that is precise enough to permit testing of specific
propositions.
Similar observations are relevant to the institutional setting within
which specific institutions operate. Although students of social institutions
often proceed by picking out individual arrangements and treating them as
though they were largely self-contained, it is easy to see that many distinct
institutions are closely linked to others. As von Moltke has pointed out
(forthcoming), it is more accurate in many circumstances to speak of
institutional structures in the sense of clusters of closely connected
arrangements that deal with broad issue areas in contrast to single issues and
that share a number of basic features. At the same time, it is clear that
structure is a variable in the sense that the tightness of institutional structures
can vary across issue areas and levels of social organization. It is probably
accurate to say, for instance, that economic institutions are more tightly
structured in this sense than environmental institutions and that meso-level
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institutions are more tightly structured than macro-level institutions. The
question of interest to this discussion, then, is whether tightly structured
arrangements are more effective than those that are loosely structured. The
common expectation is that this will be the case due to processes of mutual
reinforcement among linked arrangements.
Yet there may also be cases in which clustering increases the danger of
sudden collapse due to the absence of barriers capable of preventing
disruptive forces from spreading from one institutional element to another, an
observation that brings us to a consideration of the links between scale and
the robustness of institutions. To what extent are the determinants of
robustness similar across institutional arrangements operating at different
levels of social organization? Are macro-level institutions less persistent than
(1) analogous arrangements at the meso-level as a consequence of the absence
of a higher authority possessing the capacity and the will to enforce key rules
or (2) similar arrangements at the micro-level due to the absence of face-toface relations that maximize transparency and activate feelings of shame? Or
are macro-level institutions likely to prove unusually persistent due to the
underdeveloped nature of international legislative processes capable of
monitoring the performance of institutional arrangements and making
changes in them? Do institutions exhibit distinct lifecycles, as those who study
meso-level arrangements have often suggested? If so, are these lifecycles
comparable across levels of social organization or do institutions arise,
flourish and decline in patterns that are different at the micro-level and the
macro-level from those characteristic of the meso-level? Is the capture of
institutions by particular interest groups (i.e. special interests), a phenomenon
that has often been noted at the meso-level, something that occurs as well at
the micro-level and the macro-level? As these questions suggest, accounts of
processes affecting the persistence of social institutions have proceeded for
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the most part at a single level of social organization with little concern for
similarities and differences in the operation of these processes across levels.
Another perspective on robustness centers on variations in the
flexibility of institutions or their capacity to adapt to changing circumstances
while retaining their defining characteristics. Does the underdeveloped
character of judicial procedures designed to settle disputes about the meaning
of ambiguous rules or legislative procedures intended to adjust rules to
changing circumstances constitute a threat to robustness at the micro-level
and the macro-level in contrast to the meso-level? Are there functional
equivalents operative at these levels that enhance flexibility, even though they
may not resemble the familiar judicial and legislative mechanisms of the
meso-level in superficial terms? Does it make sense, for example, to compare
the processes usually grouped under the heading of common law in domestic
settings with those associated with customary law in local and international
settings? Are there parallels between the use of "soft law" arrangements at the
international level as a way to deal with situations where circumstances (or
our understanding of them) are changing rapidly and various administrative
procedures at the meso-level and informal understandings at the micro-level?
Does social learning occur at each level of social organization, and is it equally
significant as a source of adaptability at the various levels? It is clear that even
(or perhaps especially) institutions that are highly robust adapt on a
continuous basis to shifting circumstances of both an endogenous and an
exogenous nature. But what we do not understand well at this stage is the
extent to which we can scale up and scale down with regard to the
determinants of flexibility or adaptability in social institutions operating at
the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.
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Underlying all these questions relating to the robustness of social
institutions are issues concerning the contributions of different social drivers
to the dynamics of social institutions (Keohane and Nye 1977). Those who
treat material conditions as master variables are apt to point to technological
changes (e.g. the introduction of more powerful agricultural equipment or
more efficient harvesting methods) or to shifts in the distribution of the
material bases of power (e.g. the advent of a monopolist or a monopsonist) in
explaining the decline of old institutions and the emergence of their
replacements. Similarly, those who point to the central role of ideas will see
cognitive shifts (e.g. the loss of credibility in the eyes of the attentive public of
the coercive apparatus of the Soviet system) as key factors in explaining
institutional change. For their part, those who look to the configuration of
interests will concentrate on the analysis of shifting patterns of interests (e.g.
the convergence of interests over the last several decades among members of
the European Union) in their efforts to account for stability and change in
social institutions.
There is no need to choose among these perspectives. Shifts in material
conditions can stimulate the growth of new ideas; new ideas can alter
configurations of interests, changing patterns of interests can affect the
distribution of material resources. But what we do want to stress here are the
prospects for scaling up and scaling down with regard to the interactions
among these driving forces and their roles as determinants of the robustness
of social institutions. Are the processes at work sufficiently similar so that we
can realistically expect to produce generalizations and causal inferences that
apply to all three levels? Or are we likely to end up with different accounts of
the determinants of robustness at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels?
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5. 2 The Problem of Interplay
Much current research on social institutions focuses on individual cases
or specific categories of institutions as self-contained or stand-alone
arrangements that can be understood either in terms of endogenous features
or in terms of the “match” between institutional attributes and characteristics
of the biophysical or social systems they regulate or manage. Analyzing an
institution in isolation is a simplification that enhances analytic tractability
and thus can help us identify its principal components and grasp its
functional “logic” more easily than if we had to deal with complex external
interdependencies. Sometimes it makes sense to argue that little is lost by
adopting this acontextual approach. Even though no institution operates in a
vacuum, some can probably be understood reasonably well without
examining their relationships to other institutions.
Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that this perspective has serious
limitations in today’s world. The effectiveness and robustness of a specific
institution will often depend not only on its own features but also on its
relationship to and interactions with one or more other institutions. This is
particularly obvious in an area such as environmental policy. Environmental
damage typically occurs as a side-effect of other, perfectly legitimate
activities, such as the production or consumption of goods and the transportation of people or goods. By implication, institutions designed to regulate
these economic activities will have important ramifications for the
environment as well. The other side of the coin is that policies or institutions
designed to protect the environment cannot simply be added to other policies
or institutions. In order to be effective, they must penetrate the activities that
cause damage to the environment in the first place, and “their” institutional
superstructure as well. Clearly, an analysis of the institutional dimensions of
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global environmental change cannot be confined to the subset of institutions
that
are
specifically
designated for
the purpose
of environmental
management.
Moreover, actors may decide deliberately to construct links between
institutions that are not substantively (inter)dependent. One reason for
coupling institutions may be that managerial efficiency can be enhanced by
assigning responsibility for different rule systems or regimes to one rather
than multiple organizations. Such “economy of scale” considerations are
particularly relevant where “regime density” is high. Second, actors will
sometimes see one institution as a model for the design of others.8 Emulation
seems most likely in cases characterized by a combination of (a) high problem
similarity and (b) marked differences in (perceived) institutional effectiveness
or robustness and/or in the social status of the creators or leaders of the
institutions concerned. Similarity is a basis for simple learning (“copying”),
and institutions and actors believed to be “successful” are more likely to be
emulated than those that are seen as “failures.” In an historical perspective,
we can often identify more or less distinct “generations” of institutions, each
of which is characterized by certain recurring features that can best be
understood in terms of the diffusion of ideas or simply as instances of
copying.
Additionally, policy games may generate their own linkages. For
various reasons of political expediency, actors may try to couple functionally
unconnected institutions in some kind of package-deal (which means, in
essence, that each side obtains something it strongly wants by conceding a
8.
Although flattering, it is not always advantageous to be treated as a model. In some cases, a solution
that could easily win acceptance when considered on its own merits in a particular case will be rejected
because one or more of the key players fear that it will create a precedent for the design of other
arrangements in the future.
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less highly valued item to the other). Sometimes one or more actors may see
two or more institutions as components of a larger project. For example, even
if it would be hard to argue that the regime established to prevent the
depletion of stratospheric ozone and the regime regulating the use of deep
seabed minerals are
linked in a relationship of direct functional
interdependence, an actor might see both as components of a new
international economic order and thus demand "consistency" in terms of
certain overarching principles of fairness or equity.
Institutions that are
subject to such politically constructed linkages cannot be understood fully
unless we see them in their wider, socially constructed context. Attempts at
changing an existing institution without due attention to such political
linkages can lead into a morass of unexpected difficulties.
As the preceding paragraphs imply, the problem of institutional
interplay can be visualized in terms of a two-dimensional figure (see Figure
2). One dimension is that of substantive or functional (inter)dependence.
Functional links exist whenever the establishment or operation of one
institution directly affects the effectiveness or robustness of another, through
some kind of inescapable interconnectedness. In the area of environmental
_______________________
Figure 2 about here
_______________________
change, this is clearly the case whenever the systems constituting the domains
of different institutions are linked through biophysical (inter)dependency (e.g.
through interaction among polluting substances or among different species
within a larger ecosystem) or through the generation of consequences for
human welfare and well-being by one sphere of social activity upon another
(e.g. industrial production upon recreation). Functional linkages between
institutions typically reflect (inter)dependence relationships existing in the
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biophysical contexts or social settings. In turn, institutional arrangements can
affect the strength and scope of interdependence in the social setting; just
think of the impact of the liberalization of international trade and investment
on the increase in volume and importance of economic transactions.
The other dimension is that of politically constructed linkages. Political
linkages exist whenever actors decide to consider two or more institutions as
parts of a larger complex or package. While functional linkages are
inescapable facts of life, political linkages are deliberately constructed and
“de-coupled.” Such linkages are most often studied in the context of
bargaining about the formation or restructuring of institutions (Sebenius
1983), but we suggest that they can significantly affect the subsequent
operations of institutions as well. In some cases, this coupling will take the
form of unilateral adaptation of one institution to another. At the practical
level, the question then becomes how to design or operate a particular
institution given the existence of another. At the international level, a set of
basic rights and rules defining state sovereignty are usually taken as an
exogenously determined parameter for the design of issue-specific regimes.
Even though the former may be seen as an obstacle to the effectiveness of the
latter, issue-specific regimes are typically “embedded” in a suite of normative
principles which constitute the deep structure of the international political
system (Young 1996). In other cases political linkages take the form of mutual
adjustment. This happens when two or more institutions are designed to
work together in order to optimize joint effectiveness, muster political
support, or achieve some other purpose that neither can accomplish on its
own. Mutual adjustment requires the existence of a decision-making arena
that can deal with both (all) institutions involved. Accordingly, it occurs more
often “horizontally” (i.e. at a given level of social organization) than
“vertically.”
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Functional (inter)dependence can be a sufficient reason for forging
political linkages, but it is not a necessary condition. As pointed out above,
institutions may be coupled for reasons of managerial efficiency or political
expedience also when there is no (compelling) functional rationale for doing
so. “Regime density” can itself be a strong argument for “clustering” (Young
1996). At least at any given level of social organization, the overall pattern is,
though, likely to be one of positive - albeit imperfect - covariance between
functional interdependence and political linkages (i.e. a clustering along the
45o line from the origin of Figure 2). Major incongruities (located in the areas
labeled 1 and 4 in Figure 2) give rise to a set of interesting questions to which
we will return in a subsequent section.
Along both of these dimensions, we may distinguish between vertical
and horizontal links. A vertical link is one that crosses levels of social
organization (micro, meso, macro). (Inter)dependence relationships linking
institutions at different levels are well known in social science. To give just
one example: one of the main propositions of dependency theory is that the
rules and structure of “the world capitalist system” determine a set of
constraints and (perverse) opportunities that profoundly affect economic and
social development at the micro-level (e.g. in rural communities in the third
world). The accumulation of wealth in the social center and the aggravation of
poverty and misery in the periphery are seen as inextricably linked through
the allocation mechanisms of capitalism. Research exploring possibilities of
introducing “alternative” and more environmentally benign lifestyles in local
communities points to similar kinds of macro-level constraints. The debate
within segments of the environmental movement is in this respect reminiscent
of a debate that took place earlier in this century within the socialist
movement about the feasibility of establishing “socialism in one country;”
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they both struggle with the question of “systemic forcing.” Looking at vertical
links in a “top-down” perspective, we note that it is a well-known observation
that many regimes require a certain minimum of institutional capacity at
lower levels to be successfully implemented. Several studies, including those
of Chayes and Chayes (1995) and Weiss and Jacobson (forthcoming), suggest
that the problem of non-compliance with international environmental
agreements may be as much a question of inadequate domestic capacity for
implementation as one of deliberate defection motivated by the pursuit of
free-rider benefits.
Horizontal links are ties between institutions operating at the same level
of social organization (e.g. that of the state). In the context of environmental
change, the most important horizontal links are those between institutions
regulating human activities causing environmental damage - primarily
economic activities such as production and consumption of goods,
transportation services, and so forth - and institutions established to protect
environmental values. Also, within each of these categories a number of
horizontal links can be found. Thus, an international regime designed to
regulate marine pollution may have significant ramifications for disposal of
polluting substances on land; any comprehensive approach to coping with
marine pollution would have to include land-based sources as well.
In a program dealing with human dimensions of global environmental
change, it seems reasonable to give priority to functional links and to the
relationship (in particular, the degree of congruity) between functional and
political links. Both horizontal and vertical links are relevant to the study of
institutional effectiveness and robustness, and we see no point in ranking
them in some order of priority at this stage. We might point out, though, that
one of the distinct contributions that an international program like IHDP can
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make is to help foster a genuinely global perspective on environmental
problems. Improving our understanding of how macro-, meso- and microlevel institutions interact to shape human behavior and the outcomes of social
processes - i.e. vertical links - is one integral and important part of that
mandate.
The research focus as delineated above calls for an interdisciplinary
effort involving three main steps. First, we have to determine the scope and
strength of functional links. This is by no means a trivial task. As pointed out
above, functional links in the institutional “superstructure” to a large extent
reflect (inter)dependence relations among the biophysical or social systems
that constitute the domains of different institutions. We can safely assume that
only a small subset of all these links are (yet) known and properly
understood. As new knowledge is acquired, new and more complex
relationships will emerge. Our understanding of the global climate change
problem is a good illustration. As scientists improve their understanding of
atmospheric chemistry, they discover - or at least become able to describe
with greater accuracy and confidence - previously unknown but important
interaction effects among different gases and between sources and sinks,
leading to adjustments in the “greenhouse equation” and over time making it
increasingly complex as well. The same kind of development is occurring in
other areas, such as that of marine biology. As scientists have painted an
increasingly complex picture of marine ecosystems, new and more complex
models for multi-species or ecosystem management have been introduced to
"match" our new understanding of nature itself. To complicate things further,
functional links are not constants that can be determined once and for all; they
are themselves subject to change as a function of, inter alia, changes in the
“human load.” As the world population grows and the average individual (at
least in the industrialized countries) uses more natural resources and other
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environmental goods, the aggregate impact of humankind’s activities on the
global environment tends to increase. We do not have to be inbred pessimists
to surmise that the combined effect of growth in knowledge and increasing
impact of human activities on the Earth's biophysical systems will (continue
to) outpace the development of institutional capacity for integrated
governance.
Having mapped functional links across substantive domains, the next
task is to determine the consequences of these links - if any - for the
effectiveness and robustness of the institutions concerned. To begin with, let
us point out that only a small subset of the multitude of (inter)dependence
relationships that exist within or among biophysical systems or systems of
human activities are consequential in the sense that they significantly enhance
or impair the effectiveness or robustness of the institutions involved. But
some do, and in dealing with those a useful first step may simply be to try to
distinguish links that are positive (in the sense that some kind of synergy
between institutions is generated) from those that are essentially neutral and
those that are negative (meaning that one institution impairs the effectiveness
or enhances the vulnerability of another). Positive synergy is generated when,
for example, the establishment or growth of an international regime or
organization helps empower corresponding institutions at the national or
subnational level, or vice versa. Such processes of (mutual) empowerment can
occur without explicit coordination; they seem to have been an important
factor in the development of institutions in the area of environmental
protection. Other functional links are clearly negative. One example that
comes to mind is the impact of the liberalization of the rules regulating
international trade and financial flows on the capacity of national
governments to manage domestic economies. Regimes for trade and
investment may undermine the effectiveness of environmental regimes, and
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vice versa (the latter e.g. through providing a legal basis for introducing new
non-tariff barriers or other obstacles to trade).
Finally, institutions are sometimes linked in an exchange of
“externalities” that may call for some (mutual) adjustment but by and large
neither enhance nor impair institutional effectiveness. These would be benign
games of coordination, where institutions would - in the terminology of
Keohane and Nye (1977) - be “sensitive” but not “vulnerable” to each other.
One example could be the relationship between environmental legislation and
agencies on the one hand and national legal and law enforcement systems on
the other. Environmental legislation will have to be adapted to the latter.
Even though requirements of consistency sometimes may be seen as a
constraint and at other times come as a welcome source of support, the net
effect is likely to be close to neutral.
The research challenge before us regarding the problem of interplay
can now be summarized in three main points. We should seek to enhance our
ability to (a) distinguish positive from negative and neutral "interference," (b)
determine the significance of various kinds of interplay for the effectiveness
and robustness of the institutions concerned, and (c) understand the dynamics
of inadvertent as well as deliberate links between different (kinds of)
institutions. In pursuing these questions we can treat effectiveness and
robustness as twin concepts only to a certain point. Even though the two are
to some extent related causally, they are not always affected to the same
degree and through the same mechanisms. There are sound reasons to
believe, for example, that the effectiveness of an institution by and large tends
to be more sensitive - in both a positive and a negative sense - to functional
linkages than robustness. On the other hand, it seems likely that at least
certain aspects of robustness - particularly that of general legitimacy - can be
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highly sensitive to some kinds of political linkages. As we study the
consequences of interplay for institutional effectiveness and robustness in
greater depth, we will certainly acquire not only a sharper but also a more
differentiated picture than we have been able to provide in this short
overview.
Knowledge in all these areas becomes particularly important when we
move on to the third step: deriving policy implications for the design and
operation of institutions. Particularly when we try to be specific, we will soon
discover that policy implications to a large extent depend on the scope,
strength, and character of the interdependence relationships existing within a
system of institutions. At the most general level, we can say that an integrated
or holistic response to global environmental change can be defined as one
where: (a) all significant consequences of response decisions are recognized as
decision premises, (b) alternative options are evaluated on the basis of some
comprehensive and aggregate measure of utility or value, and {c} the different
elements are consistent with one another (see Underdal 1980). In other words,
a response strategy is "integrated" to the extent that it recognizes its own
consequences as premises for decisions, evaluates them in terms of an
aggregate measure of "global welfare," and penetrates all institutions and
actors involved in (or indirectly relevant to) its implementation. These are
obviously somewhat utopian ideals. Let us therefore here focus attention on
just one structural aspect of this abstract ideal: the congruity or "fit" between
an institution and the biophysical an social systems which make up its
domain.
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5.3 The Problem of Fit
Whereas the problems of scale and interplay encompass a range of
comparatively specific ideas, the problem of fit revolves around one big idea.
It asserts that the effectiveness and the robustness of social institutions are
functions of the fit between the institutions themselves and the biophysical
and social domains in which they operate. The better the match between an
institution and its domain, the more effective and robust the institution will
be. It is clear from this proposition that fit is a variable that can range widely
from one situation to another and even from one time period to another with
respect to the same institution. But beyond this conceptualization of fit as a
variable, there are a number of ambiguities about the idea of fit that will
require careful consideration in any effort to devise a fruitful research
program dealing with this theme. Not only is it hard to establish the bounds
of fit treated as a variable, but it is also and more importantly unclear how to
organize our thinking about the concept of domain in this context. In our
judgment, there are at least three differentiable components of domain that
merit attention in developing this line of enquiry: (1) the biophysical context,
(2) the social or societal setting, and (3) the problem structure or nature of the
problem to be solved. In the discussion to follow, we consider each of these
components
with
particular
reference
to
issues
relevant
to
global
environmental change.
Biophysical context. At one level, the significance of the fit between an
institution and the biophysical systems with which it interacts is a
straightforward matter that is easy to grasp. A few simple examples will
suffice to illustrate this observation. Regimes concerned with the conservation
of living resources that do not cover the entire ranges of migratory species
(e.g. fish, marine mammals, birds) have built-in weaknesses that can subvert
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their ability to fulfill their goals. Conservation regimes that regulate the
harvesting of specific species (e.g. the regime for whales and whaling) or
trade in living resources (e.g. CITES) but that do not contain adequate
provisions for protecting habitats that are critical to the survival of the
relevant species cannot provide any guarantee that the resources in question
will be conserved, no matter how effective they are in controlling harvesting
or trade. Regimes governing the extraction of nonrenewable resources (e.g.
hardrock minerals) that fail to provide clearcut rules dealing with the
treatment of wastes are likely to precipitate largescale changes in surrounding
ecosystems. Regimes that cover the extraction of oil and gas but do not deal
with issues relating to the shipment of these resources to markets are apt to
jeopardize terrestrial systems located along pipeline routes or marine systems
located along tanker routes.
Nor are these concerns limited to the operation of regimes dealing with
environmental or resource issues in any narrow sense of those terms. Arms
control arrangements, for instance, need to be sensitive to matters that involve
the biophysical setting. A comprehensive nuclear test ban that failed to come
to terms with physical conditions affecting efforts to monitor the occurrence
of underground explosions would have little chance of success. Somewhat
similar comments are in order regarding arrangements dealing with economic
matters. A regime that regulates commercial fishing but fails to regulate the
competition among fishers to acquire ever more advanced harvesting
technologies, for instance, will lead to outcomes that are highly inefficient
from an economic point of view. Such a regime is likely to produce poor
results in terms of robustness as well.
At the same time, there are several larger concerns that arise in
thinking about the issue of the biophysical context within which regimes
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operate but that are less straightforward. This is partly a result of adopting a
systems perspective in thinking about the biophysical context. Increasingly,
we are aware that social institutions interact with biological and physical
systems that are large, complex and interdependent rather than with
separable components of these systems (e.g. individual species of fish) that
can be managed in isolation from the more extended systems to which they
belong (Sherman 1992). It is impossible to remove a sizable proportion of the
biomass of one or a few species from an ecosystem, for example, without
triggering cascades that affect - sometimes dramatically - the dynamics of the
whole system (National Research Council 1996). Similarly, injecting wastes
(e.g. chemicals like carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide) into large aquatic,
terrestrial, or atmospheric systems can trigger effects leading to profound
changes in the overall systems. This realization has given rise over the last
several decades to the growth of interest in whole ecosystems perspectives,
critical loads, and the dynamics of bioregions. Intellectually, this development
has much to recommend it. Yet it also poses problems in thinking about the fit
between institutions and the biophysical context. Linkages extend in all
directions both spatially and temporally, and there is no simple procedure for
specifying appropriate system boundaries for purposes of dealing with
management concerns in particular cases. Equally important, large
biophysical systems are highly complex, often giving rise to non-linear
processes that are poorly understood and impossible to predict. Whereas a
focus on individual species tends to produce models (e.g. sustainable yield
models) that are analytically tractable but of limited use for management
purposes, then, approaches dealing with large biophysical systems in more
holistic terms frequently yield models that are more relevant but less tractable
analytically (Haeuber 1996).
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Systems thinking suggests the value of an approach that features
efforts to identify properties of biophysical systems and then to match them
with parallel attributes of institutional arrangements in the interests of
developing social practices likely to produce results that are sustainable
(Cleveland et. al. 1996, Costanza and Folke 1996). Just as we speak of
attributes like flexibility, adaptiveness, and robustness in thinking about
regimes, we can consider properties like diversity, productivity, fragility, and
regenerative capacity in examining biophysical systems. Fit then becomes a
matter of structuring institutions in ways that are compatible with the
properties of the biophysical systems with which they interact. It makes sense,
for example, to institute particularly strict regulations governing the harvest
of living resources that belong to systems whose biological productivity is
low. In the same way, there are good reasons to exercise particular care in
dealing with systems in which discontinuities or nonlinear changes - in
contrast to the restoration of some preexisting state - are high probability
events (Wilson et. al.
1994). Much of the concern expressed by those
endeavoring to strengthen the climate regime, for instance, can be traced to a
judgment that the planet's climate system is subject to dramatic transitions of
this sort.
Going a step further, there is much to be gained from a strategy that
seeks to endogenize the role of human actors in large biophysical systems in
which humans have become major players (Netting 1981). Instead of seeking
to understand the biological and physical dynamics of large marine
ecosystems, for instance, and then turning to the activities of humans as
something that is exogenous in the sense of occurring outside the system, this
approach suggests integrating human actions both as forcing functions and as
response mechanisms directly into models of these ecosystems. This way of
thinking leads to the framing of a variety of searching questions that may
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have far-reaching implications for the design and administration of
institutional arrangements. In looking at the fisheries of the Northwest
Atlantic, to take a concrete case, we need to devote more energy to
understanding the relative importance of changes in water temperatures,
interactions among non-human species, human harvesting, and the
introduction of anthropogenic pollutants as drivers in this large marine
ecosystem (McAllister 1994). Improved knowledge of such matters would not
only yield information directly relevant to setting harvest levels for individual
species on an annual basis, but it would also help to determine what actions
aside from the regulation of harvests are needed to sustain both the
biophysical and the human systems in question. More generally, analysis of
this sort would help to supplant current tendencies both to overestimate and
to underestimate the role of anthropogenic forces in large biophysical
systems.
Social setting. Of equal importance is the fit between the character of
an institutional arrangement and the social or societal setting in which it
operates. A regime that requires the use of sophisticated technologies to
ensure that the behavior of actors is transparent cannot succeed in a setting
where these technologies are unavailable to many regime members. An
arrangement that calls for complex and expensive management efforts on the
part of members will run into trouble in situations where many members
have little capacity to engage in such efforts. Institutions that require actors to
develop and implement the use of new products (e.g. substitutes for CFCs in
refrigerators and air conditioners) will need to address explicitly economic
and financial issues relating to the transition from existing modes of
production to alternative modes of production (Parson and Greene 1995).
Arrangements that depend on the existence of a sense of community to ensure
that the behavior of individual members is transparent and to bring pressure
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to bear on public officials to take seriously their institutional commitments are
likely to run into trouble in settings that do not feature a strong civil society.
For purposes of analysis, it is helpful to divide these observations
about the social setting into two groups: those that pertain to the actors whose
behavior is at stake and those that relate to the social system as a whole. In the
first instance, there is the question of whether all the important actors (e.g.
user groups in connection with living resources) are included as members of a
regime. Arrangements dealing with whaling that do not include Japan, with
climate change that do not cover China, or with biological diversity that do
not encompass Brazil, for instance, are doomed to failure from the outset.
Other concerns arise in connection with both the number of actors involved
and the degree to which they form a homogeneous group in relevant ways
(Keohane and Ostrom eds. 1995). It is one thing to regulate the activities of a
handful of large corporations that produce CFCs, quite another to deal with
thousands of smallscale fishers or millions of owners of automobiles.
Similarly, what works among a group of industrialized democracies sharing a
high standard of living and possessing the capacity to implement rules
effectively may be quite ineffectual among groups of actors that are more
heterogeneous with regard to economic and political structures as well as
level of development. Even more specifically, a number of analysts have
noted important differences among broadly similar countries, like Canada,
Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that have a bearing on
the likelihood that specific institutions will operate successfully (Vogel 1986).
In short, the societal setting matters, and successful institutions are likely to be
those that are well-adapted to the social conditions under which they operate.
Similar observations are in order about the nature of prevailing social
systems in contrast to the character of the players who populate these
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systems. Social systems vary among themselves along a number of relevant
dimensions, including the nature of the technologies in common use, the
distribution of the material bases of power, the degree of homogeneity with
respect to forms of economic and political organization, the extent of role
differentiation among members, the strength of civil society, and the presence
of what is often described as a sense of community. All these attributes may
have significant implications for the types of institutions that are likely to
work well in a particular societal setting. Arrangements requiring highly
sophisticated monitoring systems cannot succeed if the relevant technologies
do not exist or are tightly controlled by a few members of the group. The
development and diffusion of new technologies over the last several decades,
for example, has opened up a number of interesting possibilities for arms
control regimes that were unworkable at an earlier time. The distribution of
the material bases of power, by contrast, is a variable that has proven more
controversial among analysts of social institutions. Some see the presence of a
dominant actor or at least an issue-area hegemon that is willing to exercise
strong leadership in the operation of an institution as an important
determinant of success. Others are more inclined to look toward a wider
distribution of power or the presence of some sort of balance of power as a
condition for success. Clearly, much work remains to be done regarding the
fit between social institutions and these material conditions prevailing in the
relevant social systems.
Recently, students of institutions have begun to take a more systematic
interest in a number of more intangible attributes of the social setting within
which institutions operate. One focus of attention in this regard is the idea of
civil society (Lipschutz 1996). Although many of those who work on
institutions have adopted a top-down approach emphasizing the roles of
authoritative political and legal processes, there is growing interest in bottom-
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up approaches that point to the roles played by networks of nonstate actors in
monitoring the performance of institutions and in bringing pressure to bear
on various public authorities to live up to their formal commitments under
the terms of institutional arrangements. The fit between social institutions and
some measurable attributes of civil society could well emerge as an important
focus of analysis in this field in the future. Going a step further in thinking
about intangible conditions, the issue of community comes into focus. As our
earlier discussion of the problem of scale suggests, there is growing interest in
the role of community as a determinant of institutional effectiveness and
robustness. Turning to the question of fit, the issue becomes one of assessing
the degree to which the sense of community existing in a social setting is wellsuited to the character of the institutions devised to deal with problems
arising in that setting. Analyzing questions of this sort poses a variety of
tough methodological problems for those committed to rigorous empirical
analysis. Nonetheless, evidence from a number of different levels of social
organization suggests that the issue of fit between the attributes of institutions
and the nature of the underlying community is one that we cannot afford to
pass over lightly.
Problem structure.
Most analysts accept the proposition that
institutions normally arise to deal with societal problems. But not all
problems are alike, a fact that raises important questions about the fit between
the institutions created to solve problems and the nature of the problems they
address. A number of difficulties confront those seeking to think
systematically about problem structure. Yet we are already able to say some
interesting things about the fit between institutions and problem structure. To
begin with, there is a useful distinction between general and specific
approaches to thinking about problem structure. General approaches direct
attention to matters like the locus of specific problems on a spectrum running
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from benign to malign problems and the extent to which the problem is best
viewed as a question of conflict resolution or as a coordinated effort to pursue
some common goal. The benign/malign distinction, as used in the work of a
group of Norwegian analysts (Wettestad 1995) and in a large-scale
comparative project on regime effectiveness led by Miles (Miles et. al.
forthcoming), is conceptualized as a function of three factors: the degree of
incongruity between individual and collective payoffs, the degree of
asymmetry, and the extent to which conflict is cumulative rather than crosscutting. Others (Rittberger and Zuern 1991) have approached problem
structure from the perspective of conflict analysis, adopting familiar
distinctions like those between conflicts of interests and clashes of values and
between goods valued in absolute and relative terms. A related approach
directs attention to processes of problem solving and integrative bargaining
(Walton and McKersie 1965). While it should be possible to translate from one
of these conceptualizations to another, more work is needed to clarify and
operationalize these distinctions; game-theoretic concepts may prove useful
for this purpose. Despite these conceptual concerns, it is already easy to see
that general distinctions regarding problem structure have an important
bearing on the design of institutions; the nature of the institutions needed to
solve problems will vary as a function of the fundamental character of the
problems themselves.
Whether or not these general approaches to problem structure prove
fruitful, it is possible to identify a variety of more specific features of
problems that have unambiguous implications for the nature of the
institutions required to solve them. Work on the theory of games and related
matters has proven particularly fruitful in thinking about such matters. There
is no need to expend time and energy worrying about devising compliance
mechanisms in the case of coordination problems, for example, whereas this is
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often a major concern in connection with collaboration problems (Snidal
1985). The number of actors whose behavior must be considered is a
significant feature of problem structure because decisionmaking procedures
that work well with only a few players break down when there are many; the
role of coalitions grows as numbers of actors increase, and the pervasiveness
of free riding regarding the costs of operating an institution increases as a
function of the size of the relevant group (Oye ed. 1986). The degree to which
an institution is expected to remain in operation over the long run is relevant
because it affects the impact of the "veil of uncertainty" and the incentives of
members to rely on some sense of fairness or justice as a means of inducing all
or most of the members of the group to participate actively on an ongoing
basis (Brennan and Buchanan 1985). The level of uncertainty regarding the
nature of the problem itself (e.g. climate change versus ozone depletion) is
significant because building in flexibility or procedures for adapting
institutional arrangements looms larger as the level of uncertainty increases. It
would be easy to amplify this set of illustrations. But the point is clear.
Individual problems have many specific characteristics that have far-reaching
implications for the nature of the institutional arrangements needed to solve
them. The fit between institutions and problem structure emerges as a major
concern in this connection, and there is much work to be done in developing a
systematic understanding of this range of relationships at every level of social
organization.
As these comments suggest, studies of the problem of fit lend
themselves to a consideration of design principles of immediate interest to
those charged with creating and operating social institutions. It is possible to
imagine the accumulation of a growing collection of more or less specific
principles that practitioners can consult as the need arises. Some of these
principles are relatively easy to formulate as the following examples make
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clear. Include the entire migratory range of living species. Be sure to include
all the significant groups of users of the resources in question. Ensure that the
technologies required to operate an institutional arrangement exist and are
available to all participants on reasonable terms. Focus on compliance
mechanisms in dealing with collaboration problems but do not spend time
worrying about compliance in connection with coordination problems. Build
in institutional flexibility in cases where there is a high level of uncertainty
about the nature of the problem itself. Other principles are less obvious and
require more subtle interpretations. It is important to devote increased
attention to decisionmaking procedures as the size of the group increases, for
instance, but this does not tell us exactly what to do about the issue. Similar
comments are in order about matters like the distribution of power in the
material sense or the relationship between group size and free riding.
We must acknowledge as well some caveats about design principles
emerging from the analysis of fit. It is not easy to reduce principles to
operational rules of thumb; many important nuances are lost in the course of
this transition. There are many cases where the range of applicability of
principles will be hard to determine. It is useful to differentiate between
coordination problems and collaboration problems, for instance, but
situations frequently arise in which the classification of a particular problem
in these terms is itself a contentious issue. In other cases, there is the prospect
of the emergence of competing design principles. Differing views regarding
the importance of finding a dominant actor willing to accept a leadership role
exemplify this prospect. In many cases, we do not know enough yet to
formulate relevant design principles. Much work remains to be done on the
concept of problem structure, for example, before this intuitively appealing
idea can be incorporated in any systematic fashion into useful design
principles. None of these observations should be regarded as discouraging.
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On the contrary, we are already in a position to articulate some useful design
principles, and there are clear indications that further research on the fit
between institutions and the domains in which they operate will prove
fruitful not only in adding to our general knowledge of social institutions but
also in framing additional design principles of value to practitioners.
6. Links to IHDP Substantive Themes
What is the connection between the analytic problems of scale,
interplay, and fit and the substantive problems that loom large on the overall
global change agenda and more particularly the IHDP research agenda?
Specifically, what are the institutional dimensions of the themes associated
with the established core project on Land-Use and Land-Cover Change
(LUCC) and with the emerging core project on Industrial Transformation
(IT)? We cannot address these questions exhaustively at this stage. But they
constitute central concerns in the development of a core project on the crosscutting theme of the Institutional Dimensions of Global Change (IDGC), and
we offer some preliminary observations about linkages between institutional
dimensions and the substantive concerns of LUCC and IT in this section. A
more focused treatment of these issues will constitute an important
component of the Science Plan for the IDGC core project to be developed in
the near future in consultation with a cross-section of scientists working on
the central concerns of LUCC and IT as well as on institutional issues.
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6.1 Institutional Dimensions of LUCC
It is easy to identify a range of social drivers that shape patterns of land
use prevailing in specific places at particular times (IGBP/HDP 1995). Some
observers point to cognitive or cultural forces, like the differences between
indigenous beliefs about human beings belonging to the land and European
or western concepts of land ownership, in accounting for variations in
stewardship or efforts to care for the land as an end in itself (Cronon 1983).
Others emphasize material conditions, like the size and distribution of human
settlements or the availability of various technologies, in explaining changes
in patterns of land use over time. But there is no doubt that institutional
factors play a large role in shaping both the behavior of humans as users of
land and associated natural resources and human responses to changes in
land cover. Among the most well-developed arguments pointing to
institutional determinants of patterns of land use are those that center on the
consequences of different structures of property or use rights. To illustrate the
linkages between institutions and patterns of land use, therefore, we comment
in this section on several well-known debates about the roles of common
property, public property, and private property in shaping patterns of land
use at various levels of social organization. In each case, we argue, the links
are strong but considerably more complex than the most familiar propositions
about such matters would lead one to believe. The study of these linkages also
raises numerous questions about what we have termed the problems of scale,
interplay, and fit.
Many observers have argued that common property arrangements
generate patterns of land use leading to the depletion of renewable resources
and the pollution of ecosystems. Well-known today in terms of the image of
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the tragedy of the commons, the logic associated with this argument is simple
(Hardin and Baden eds. 1977). It suggests that users of common property
resources will overuse these resources because they have little or no incentive
to conserve them for future use or to invest in activities designed to protect or
upgrade these resources over time. Individual appropriators will assume that
any resources they leave will simply be harvested by other members of the
user group and that others will benefit from their conservation efforts without
contributing to the cost of implementing them. If each member of the group
responds in a similar fashion, the result will be the familiar tragedy in which
stocks of wildlife are depleted, common fields are exhausted, and ecosystems
degraded.
As it turns out, however, there are many instances in which common
property arrangements do not lead to the tragedy of the commons (Feeny et.
al. 1990). Sometimes this is simply a consequence of supply exceeding
demand, a situation in which users can behave individualistically without
causing collective harm. But in many cases, the failure of the tragedy of the
commons to materialize is attributable to the development or more or less
elaborate sets of rules or institutional arrangements that place effective
restrictions on the behavior of individual users of common property
resources. Spearheaded by students of smallscale traditional societies located
in various parts of the world, a vigorous intellectual movement has emerged
that focuses attention squarely on the role of institutional arrangements as
devices for controlling the dynamic associated with the tragedy of the
commons. The point of this line of thinking is not to assert that users of
common property never deplete resources or pollute ecosystems. Rather, the
resultant work seeks to pinpoint those conditions that determine whether
owners of common property resources succeed in using their resources in a
sustainable fashion and whether these conditions are more or less restrictive
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than the parallel conditions governing sustainable uses of public or private
property (McKean 1992).
Recently, students of international relations have posed similar
questions about the use of common property resources that lie outside the
jurisdiction of the members of international society (e.g. the high seas, the
electromagnetic spectrum, the global climate system). This has opened up
interesting opportunities to consider matters of scale in thinking about the use
of common property resources (Young 1994b). It has also introduced a lively
debate about the idea of "governance without government," since both
smallscale societies and international society are settings in which users of
land and natural resources have devised techniques for solving problems of
governance without resorting to the establishment of governments in the
ordinary sense of the term (Rosenau and Czempiel eds. 1992). The effect of
this analytic development has been to revive interest in common property at
all levels of social organization as an alternative to both public property and
private property among those interested in controlling patterns of land use to
avoid detrimental environmental consequences.
In contrast to the conditions prevailing in smallscale societies and in
international society, public property is a prominent feature of most national
or domestic social systems. Even in the United States, where the value of
private property is deeply engrained in the prevailing political culture, the
federal government alone holds title to about one third of the nation's land
(Brubaker ed. 1984). Comparable figures in many other countries are
substantially higher. In some cases, the size of the public domain is a product
of historical accidents, and governments have actively pursued policies
designed to transfer publicly owned land into private hands. In other cases,
the dominance of the state as a land owner is a product of political ideology.
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But in either case, the importance of the public domain in most national
societies makes it interesting to note that public property has become a
common target of criticism on the part of those concerned with the
environmental consequences of patterns of land use (Stroup and Baden 1983).
Public land, on this account, is apt to be exploited by special interests (e.g.
railroads, timber companies, miners) capable of manipulating the political
process to their own advantage but lacking any incentive to protect
ecosystems that cannot be used to produce short-term private gains. In some
cases, these interests have orchestrated the transfer of public land into private
hands on concessional terms. In other cases, private interests have been
content to exploit the natural resources of the public domain without taking
title to such lands or assuming any responsibility for environmental
stewardship. Added to this set of problems are recurrent conflicts over the
control of the public domain between different levels of government in
national societies. The ongoing controversy between the U.S. federal
government and the governments of a number of western states regarding the
control of public land, often described as the "sagebrush rebellion," is a
prominent case in point (Nelson 1995).
Yet here, too, reality is more complex than this simple logic suggests.
National governments have developed strikingly different approaches to the
management of the public domain, even within the same society and during
the same era. In the United States, for example, the federal government
operates, at one and the same time, distinct systems allowing miners to patent
claims to land containing commercially valuable minerals, ranchers to lease
public grazing lands, timber companies to purchase wood on land located in
the public domain, and fishers to harvest fish in publicly managed waters in
the absence of any payment to the government (Klyza 1994, Wilkinson 1992).
At the same time, governments have played a critical role in framing policies
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to set aside portions of the public domain to be managed as parks and wildlife
refuges, and they have pioneered in the development of the concept of
wilderness as a long-term management philosophy for large tracts of publicly
owned land (Nash 1982). Without doubt, the management of the public
domain is subject to recurrent controversy and is affected by passing fashions
regarding human/environment relationships. Nonetheless, there is no
denying that the existence of the public domain has provided opportunities to
experiment with various forms of environmental stewardship that would
have been unlikely to emerge in connection with other structures of property
rights.
Another well-known argument focuses on the virtues of private
property as a means of avoiding the alleged excesses of common property
and public property systems. Here again the central idea is simple. It focuses
on the proposition that owners of private property experience unambiguous
incentives to conserve or even enhance the value of their holdings and
therefore to use land on a sustainable basis (Anderson ed. 1983). Unlike the
individual member of the ownership group in the case of common property,
the owner of private property can reap future benefits from the resources he
sets aside today. And unlike the user of public property who has no incentive
to think in terms of stewardship, the holder of private property will seek to
maximize the income stream flowing from his property over time. It is not
difficult to point to evidence that supports this argument. Ranchers typically
treat the land they own differently from land they lease from the government.
Timber companies follow different practices in dealing with national forest
land and privately owned commercial forests. Manufacturers use aquatic and
marine systems as sinks for wastes in ways that differ from the way they use
private property whose owners charge for such services.
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Yet, as many critics have noted, the virtues of private property systems
are by no means unambiguous when it comes to their consequences for
patterns of land use (Brubaker ed. 1984). Private owners generally pay little
attention to uses of land, like the maintenance of biological diversity, that take
the form of public goods whose benefits cannot be subjected to exclusionary
devices. Private owners often employ high discount rates in making decisions
about the use of their land. In extreme cases, they may find it attractive to
extract whatever profits they can in the short run and then simply abandon
the land as they move on to other pursuits. Nor are private owners immune
from the impacts of ignorance or misinformation affecting patterns of land
use. Agricultural practices leading to severe losses of topsoil, for example,
often reflect a poor understanding of the relevant ecosystems as well as a lack
of concern for longer-term consequences. As a result, most societies have
experimented with a variety of restrictions on the freedom of private owners
to use their land as they see fit. Some of these restrictions have proven
ineffective (e.g. many soil conservation regulations) or inefficient (e.g. many
regulations dealing with the disposal of wastes). Others have produced a
severe backlash on the part of property owners who oppose such restrictions
as impermissible or "regulatory" takings on the part of government (Epstein
1985). Nonetheless, it is clear that private property, like common property
and public property, is not a panacea when it comes to the environmental
consequences of land use.
These observations regarding structures of property rights should
suffice to demonstrate the importance of institutional drivers as determinants
of patterns of land use and the impacts on ecosystems associated with
prevailing patterns of land use. At the same time, institutional arrangements
figure prominently in many efforts to respond to changes in land cover,
whether or not these changes are attributable to anthropogenic forces.
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Persistent decreases in precipitation may give rise to the development of rules
regarding withdrawals of water from streams and practices designed to
control the risk of fire. Changes in the abundance and distribution of species
of wild fauna and flora can lead to public regulations regarding the freedom
of property owners to make use of such species located on their land.
Concerns about the fragmentation of habitats sometimes kindle efforts to
regulate land use through various forms of zoning and, more recently, to
work out swaps between private and public owners designed to protect
critical habitats. Whether the land in question is subject to common property,
public property, or private property arrangements, users can expect to find
themselves subject to increasingly elaborate resource regimes that involve
overlaying systems of rules restricting uses of land on the underlying
substrate of property rights. Needless to say, the rules that make up these
regimes differ dramatically across places, times, and levels of social
organization. But the complete package of institutional determinants of land
use in every case consists of a set of property or use rights coupled with a
collection of restrictive rules that grow up over time to address social
problems arising from the activities of land users.
At one level, resource regimes treated as responses to problems
associated with various uses of land may seem difficult to compare with one
another. They vary across cultures, time periods, and levels of social
organization. Yet they are all mechanisms of social control that come into
existence in response to problems either caused by the unrestricted behavior
of users of terrestrial and marine systems or caused by biogenic forces
affecting uses of land on the part of humans (Young 1982). Given the fact that
these regimes also vary greatly in terms of their effectiveness or, in other
words, the degree to which they succeed in solving the problems that lead to
their creation, the study of resource regimes offers excellent opportunities for
comparative analyses by those concerned generally with matters of land use
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and more specifically with the problems of scale, interplay, and fit. Are there
certain factors that are common to successful resource regimes regardless of
the resources they address or the level of social organization at which they
operate? Conversely, are resource regimes highly situation specific in the
sense that success depends on tailoring the characteristics of these
institutional arrangements with great care to the particular setting in which
they are expected to operate? The answers to these questions will have farreaching implications for the efforts of those charged with controlling patterns
of land use in the interests of coming to terms with largescale environmental
change.
Whatever their consequences in terms of conservation, resource
regimes commonly produce distributive consequences that affect the interests
of stakeholders or user groups concerned with the relevant resources or
ecosystems.
Regimes
may
establish
preferences
among
subsistence,
commercial, and recreational harvesters of living resources that take effect
whenever the supply of the resources is insufficient to satisfy the aggregate
demand. Regimes may lay down liability rules that govern situations in
which the activities of one user group (e.g, those responsible for agricultural
runoffs) interfere with the activities of another user group (e.g. harvesters of
fish). Similarly, these arrangements may have the effect of subsidizing the
activities of certain user groups (e.g. ranchers who pay fees to graze cattle on
public lands or wood producers who harvest timber on public lands). Because
the distributive impacts of regimes show up early and affect the private
interests of various user groups, these consequences of institutional
arrangements regularly become contentious issues in various public forums.
It follows that any effort to establish regimes designed to protect the integrity
of large ecosystems must be sensitive to distributive issues that can destroy
the capacity of institutional arrangements to contribute to the pursuit of
conservation.
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6.2 Institutional Dimensions of IT
To ask about the determinants of industrial transformation is to launch
an enquiry into the drivers of economic change approached from a systems
perspective. As a recent IHDP Scoping Report on this emerging project puts
it, "[i]ndustrial activities can be regarded as a system constituted in ways that
vary through time and over space, and which have impacts on the natural
environment that are also spatially and temporally variable." Industrial
transformation, then, is a matter of the "human drives and mechanisms that
could enable a transformation of the industrial system towards sustainability,
and in physical terms to decouple industrial activities from their
environmental impacts " (Vellinga 1996: 3-4).9 Numerous factors play a role as
determinants of the overall character and performance of economic systems.
Among these, institutional factors figure at (1) the macro-level through the
operations of organizations like the WTO and the development of regimes
dealing with matters such as intellectual property rights, (2) the meso-level
through the efforts of governments to devise rules relating to economic
behavior and the initiatives of a variety of nongovernmental organizations,
and (3) the micro-level through changes in operating procedures at the level
of the firm.
Because the IT project is at an earlier stage of development than LUCC,
it is not possible at this stage to lay out a detailed research agenda dealing
with the institutional dimensions of industrial transformation. But the project
is evolving rapidly and even at this early stage, we can identify important
links between institutional forces and major changes in the character and
performance of economic systems. Some specific examples will serve to clarify
9.
We are indebted to Pier Vellinga for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this section of the report.
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this point. A central theme of the "new economic history," exemplified by the
work of North and his collaborators (North and Thomas 1973), is the idea that
the emergence of systems of private property rights played an essential role in
the growth of towns and the rise of modern trading systems in Europe
starting in the later middle ages. In effect, secure property rights available to
ordinary individuals allowed tradesmen without significant land holdings to
become entrepreneurs capable of bringing together diverse factors of
production to fabricate manufactured goods and creating organized markets
in which these goods could be bought and sold. The new economic historians
have emphasized the role of these institutional innovations in explaining the
rise of the West and with it the growing geopolitical dominance of Europe
that reached its height during the nineteenth century. This is not to deny the
significance of cultural factors, like the opposition of the Catholic Church to
the establishment of money markets or the system of values and beliefs that
Weber termed the Protestant ethic (Weber 1958). Nor is it to deemphasize the
significance of technological advances, such as new agricultural practices
allowing declining numbers of farm workers to feed growing human
populations. But the new economic history points to the role of emerging
systems of property rights even in connection with these factors as sources of
incentives to create money markets or to invest time and energy in inventing
and perfecting new technologies.
While the technological advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries obviously loom large as driving forces behind the industrial
revolution, the rise of capitalist economies - free enterprise systems relying on
market signals to govern decisions about the production of goods and
services - owes a great deal to the emergence of a number of institutional
innovations built on the foundation provided by private property but going
well beyond issues of property rights as such. These innovations include
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increasingly elaborate practices dealing with contracts, financial transactions,
torts, patents, and insurance as well as new forms of organization reflected in
the growing role of corporations as instruments for the conduct of industrial
production. Taken together, these institutional arrangements constitute a
complex framework that is essential to the operation of market-based
economies; their central roles make it easy to understand why many analysts
approach economic systems as social institutions in which actors occupying
well-defined roles (e.g. buyer and seller, producer and consumer) interact
with one another on the basis of clearcut rules that play an important part in
determining the collective outcomes flowing from the operation of these
systems.
Recently, a number of analysts have raised questions as well about
interactions between economic systems and the political institutions with
which they interact in specific social settings. One interesting line of enquiry
in this area concerns links between capitalism and democracy on the one hand
and between socialism and authoritarianism on the other. Although this
subject is plagued with definitional pitfalls, it would be difficult to make a
compelling case for the proposition that the presence of democratic political
institutions constitutes a necessary condition for capitalism to arise and
flourish. Conversely, there is no compelling reason to conclude that
democratic socialism is an oxymoron, despite the evidence from some
notorious twentieth century cases. Still, there are certainly connections of a
more specific nature between the character and performance of economic
systems and political institutions. Because capitalism requires an institutional
environment featuring secure property rights, enforceable contracts, and welldefined liability rules, a political system allowing the state to expropriate
private property at will and offering no assurances that contractual
obligations will be fulfilled would constitute a major impediment to the
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operation of a capitalist economy. By the same token, although some
arrangements associated with socialism (e.g. redistributive programs in the
areas of health, education, and welfare) are perfectly compatible with
democracy, the operation of a socialist economy requires a stable and
authoritative planning process that is likely to be disrupted by too much
exposure to erratic fluctuations in public opinion.
These observations focus on the role of institutional drivers as
determinants of the character, performance, and evolution of economic
systems. But much of the interest in industrial transformation as a focus of
attention in connection with largescale environmental change centers on the
development of strategies designed to bring about changes in features of
advanced industrial systems that are regarded as sources of anthropogenic
disturbances in key ecosystems. What would it take, for example, to change
industrial practices in such a way as to reduce their energy intensity or at least
to decrease reliance on energy sources that are major producers of greenhouse
gas emissions? What are the prospects for pursuing the ideas of the industrial
ecology movement regarding industrial loops formed by using residuals from
one manufacturing process as valuable inputs into other industrial processes
(Ayres 1996)? How might we make progress toward the dematerialization of
industrial production that many analysts have suggested as a means of
controlling the ill effects of global environmental change? Here, too, the focus
is on forces producing change in economic systems. But now the emphasis is
on devising conscious strategies to avoid or control anthropogenic impacts on
key ecosystems rather than identifying those forces that explain patterns of
change in economic systems over time.
As in the discussion of responses to land cover change, institutional
factors come into play in many ideas about ways to encourage industrial
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transformation of an environmentally benign sort. Several distinct strategies
involving institutional initiatives are worth noting even in this brief account.
Many observers suggest redefining prevailing systems of property rights in
such a way as to require firms to pay for environmental services (e.g. the use
of atmospheric and aquatic systems as repositories for wastes). Some would
go a step farther and compel firms to compensate victims of externalities
associated with their operations (e.g. health effects associated with pollution
or the degradation of property resulting from nearby industrial operations).
An alternative approach features the development of systems of regulations
that have the effect of placing restrictions on the rights of property owners,
without redefining property rights in any direct sense. Much of the recent
debate about efforts to alter economic behavior in the interests of protecting
environmental values centers on arguments about the relative merits of
institutional innovations intended to channel behavior through the
manipulation of incentives (e.g. making polluters pay for the damages they
cause) or through the formulation of rules governing the actions of economic
actors (e.g. requirements that manufacturers outfit new cars with catalytic
converters).
This perspective also suggests the value of differentiating among levels
of social organization in thinking about ways to promote industrial
transformation. Understandably, much attention in this area has been
directed toward initiatives that governments might take to influence the
behavior of actors in industrial systems. Specific suggestions involve
changing systems of national accounting to include costs associated with the
use of natural capital or the pollution of ecosystems; reconfiguring property
rights to internalize various costs of production that are currently ignored as
externalities; introducing systems of standards and charges or tradable
permits to give firms incentives to include environmental considerations in
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calculations of production costs; experimenting with eco-labeling in an effort
to influence the behavior of consumers by making sure they are wellinformed about products, and instituting truth in advertising rules to
publicize environmental concerns associated with various products. This line
of thinking raises as well the now familiar debates about the relative merits of
policies based on command-and-control approaches (e.g. the use of
regulations or directives) and market-based approaches (e.g. the introduction
of tradable emissions permits) as methods to redirect the behavior of actors in
industrial systems.
Important as public authorities are, debates about government actions
should not be allowed to obscure the role of institutional factors at the level of
industries or industrial sectors and even at the level of the individual firm in
guiding behavior that is relevant to industrial transformation. Whereas
individual firms might be willing to alter methods of production if they could
be sure that their competitors would follow suit, it is often difficult to create
regimes capable of ensuring that all participants in a given industry or
economic sector will comply with important rules. Are there ways short of
government intervention to solve this problem? Within the individual firm,
by contrast, there are important issues relating to the development of
environmental auditing procedures, appeals to environmental consciousness
as a marketing tool, and the creation of units within corporations assigned to
keep track of environmental concerns and to institutionalize environmental
advocacy. Intersecting with these questions about the behavior of the firm are
issues relating to the formation of consumer preferences, the impact of these
preferences on corporate behavior, and the role of nongovernmental
organizations in sensitizing consumers to environmental issues associated
with specific products and production processes. Recent shifts in the
allocation of tasks and resources between the public sector and the private
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sector in many societies make it particularly important to think more
systematically about strategies to promote industrial transformation that do
not rely on government action.
From a theoretical perspective, much of this discussion about strategies
designed to alter industrial systems can be viewed as a debate about the
production of collective or public goods. The protection of the Earth's climate
system and the maintenance of biological diversity, for example, are collective
goods in the sense that there is no way at present to exclude those who do not
contribute from benefiting from the production of these goods. Left to their
own devices under conditions of this sort, individual actors can be expected
to minimize their voluntary contributions to the supply of such goods or, in
other words, to engage in what is often called free-riding behavior (Olson
1965). Here again the solution is likely to involve institutional innovations. In
some cases, this may mean devising ways to transform collective goods into
private goods through the introduction of exclusion mechanisms where none
had previously existed (e.g. encoding TV broadcasts and requiring viewers to
pay for the use of decoding devices). In other cases, the supply of collective
goods is apt to require the intervention of some public authority able to
devise appropriate cost-sharing mechanisms and to raise revenues needed to
fund such arrangements. As students of public choice have noted, turning to
political institutions as a means of supplying collective goods is far from
trouble free, and it is not surprising that vigorous debates have arisen in
many settings about the relative merits of alternative approaches to the
supply of such goods. But the point we wish to stress in this account is that all
the major options for coming to terms with environmental problems
involving the supply of collective goods feature institutional innovations of
one sort or another.
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7. Links to LOICZ
The notion of a matrix agenda including joint modules at the interface
between projects focusing on substantive problem areas and projects focusing
on cross-cutting themes was originally adopted with reference to IHDP itself.
There is, however, one IGBP core project that seems to offer an interesting
potential for cross-fertilization with the project outlined here: the project
called Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ). As described in
its Implementation Plan, the overall purpose of LOICZ is
to determine at regional and global scales: the nature of that dynamic
interaction [where land, ocean, and atmosphere meet]; how changes in
various compartments of the Earth system are affecting coastal zones
and altering their role in the global cycles; to assess how future changes
in these areas will affect their use by people; and to provide a sound
scientific basis for future integrated management of coastal areas on a
sustainable basis. (IGBP 1994: 7)
LOICZ focuses first and foremost on natural science topics such as the
impact of changes in external forcing or boundary conditions on coastal
fluxes, coastal biogeomorphology, and the effects of sea level change on
coastal ecosystems. But one of the project's four main foci does deal explicitly
with economic and social aspects, including the role of institutions. Among
the institutional questions highlighted are the effects of different ownership
and usufruct rights on human uses of coastal resources, and the effectiveness
of different management or governance systems in providing "integrated
management... on a sustainable basis." The former suggests the possibility of
developing a joint module that parallels the one that we have suggested at the
interface with LUCC. Developing such a parallel module could open
interesting possibilities for creating additional synergy through trilateral
exchanges. The latter question is germane to our interest in the ways in which
institutional effectiveness is enhanced or impaired by (a) various kinds of
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links and interplay between two or more institutions, and (b) the degree of
congruity or fit that exists between an institution and the biophysical or social
systems that constitute its domain.
This leads us to conclude that a joint module with LOICZ could focus
on one or both of the following broad research questions:
(1) How do different systems of property and use rights affect the
nature, volume and distribution of human uses of coastal zone
resources?
(2) How effective are different management and governance systems in
guiding human activities in the coastal zone so as to enhance social
welfare on a sustainable basis and in responding to extreme events
(such as hurricanes and tidal waves) and incremental changes (such as
sea-level rise) in coastal environments?
8. Integration with Other Global Change Models
An IHDP project on institutions could and should be part of a more
comprehensive research agenda dealing with global environmental change.
This implies, among other things, that research on institutions would be
undertaken partly for the purpose of feeding into more comprehensive,
interdisciplinary models of global environmental change. The matrix
architecture that we have proposed above, which includes joint modules at
the interface with other IHDP projects focusing on substantive problem areas,
points directly to this function. Since interdisciplinary models require a
certain minimum of compatibility among different components, it follows that
an attempt at becoming part of such a comprehensive enterprise may have
important implications regarding the choice of analytical tools as well as
methodological approaches. Suffice it here to consider briefly three of the
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issues that typically arise at the interface between social and natural science
research on global change.
One of the distinctive features of most natural science components of
global change models is that they require quantitative statements about the
form and strength of causal relationships. The impact of variable X on
variable Y is to be expressed in terms of at least interval scale measurement.
This is a requirement that social science research often cannot meet (and one
which sometimes creates great difficulties for the natural sciences, too). Most
of the key variables we have referred to above - including those of
institutional effectiveness and robustness - are normally measured only in
terms of ordinal scales. Moreover, much of social science research on
institutions is aimed at the more basic objective of simply identifying the
causal mechanisms at work and understanding their operational “logic.” It is
a far cry from understanding the basic workings of common property systems
to determining precisely how much the intensity and distribution of human
uses of a given environmental resource would be affected by a particular
change in the property rights system. What social science research can
presently deliver is essentially the former; what the builders and operators of
comprehensive, interdisciplinary global change models ask for is primarily
the latter.
A second issue pertains to forecasting. The effort to predict future
developments is an integral part of much natural science research on global
change. At the same time, it is an exercise in which some social scientists
simply refuse to become involved and to which many others would respond
by at least insisting that there is a fundamental difference between forecasting
the development of a biophysical system and forecasting human behavior. It
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is not yet clear to what extent and how this difference can be reflected
adequately in comprehensive global change models.
The third issue pertains to time scales. Natural science research often
deals with time scales that social scientists simply cannot cover. Even the
relatively “modest” ambitions of LUCC, which aims at mapping land-use and
land-cover changes that have taken place over the past 300 years and
forecasting changes that will take place over the next 50-100 years, go beyond
what several relevant fields of social science research can confidently claim to
cover adequately. For example, it would be hard to find good data allowing
us to map with a fair amount of precision changes that have occurred in
human perceptions and valuation of land and benefits derived from land use
between the 17th and 20th centuries. We are probably in a somewhat better
position to describe institutional changes. The general message is nonetheless
clear: social science researchers most often find themselves at a disadvantage
compared to their natural science counterparts when it comes to data needed
to deal with long time scales. The same applies to some extent to large spatial
scales.
One important implication of this is that a project on the institutional
dimensions of global environmental change should try to frame its findings in
terms that can be considered “transdisciplinary” whenever such tools are
available. In this connection, we think a strong case can be made for turning
to the analytical toolbox of formal modeling generally and the “rational
choice” paradigm more specifically as an overarching, integrating framework.
We do recognize that much current research relevant to the agenda that we
have outlined above is framed in terms of other and to some extent quite
different analytical perspectives. This applies, inter alia, to much important
work subsumed under the label of the “new institutionalism” (March and
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Olsen 1989). We think it is important to tap into these traditions of research.
But at the same time, we regard the adoption of a coherent analytical
framework as an important, perhaps even a necessary, step to ensure
consistency and integration of an interdisciplinary and international project
on the institutional dimensions of global change. In some form, rational choice
modeling is used in all the social sciences, albeit more so in economics than in
anthropology. It also provides, we believe, a language that is particularly
well-suited for communication and collaboration with natural scientists.
9. Integrative Activities
In one sense, the research program called for in this report is
straightforward. We propose a concerted effort to (1) expand our knowledge
of the effectiveness and the robustness of social institutions, (2) direct
systematic attention to the problems of scale, interplay, and fit as keys to the
pursuit of this objective, and (3) apply the resultant insights to the substantive
problems involving largescale environmental change identified in the LUCC,
IT, and LOICZ core projects. Yet there are several cross-cutting issues of a
conceptual and methodological nature that arise in all efforts to study the
impacts of social institutions and that are pertinent to a core project on the
Institutional Dimensions of Global Change. In this section, we single out four
issues for particular attention: the development of a common discourse, the
achievement of conceptual harmonization, the creation of empirical
databases, and the distillation of design principles.
9.1 Developing a Common Discourse
The study of social institutions brings into contact several groups of
researchers who do not have a tradition of interacting cooperatively and who,
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in many cases, define key terms differently or use different terms to refer to
the same thing. Economists and sociologists, for instance, differ markedly in
the use of such terms as institutions and organizations. Even more to the
point is the relative lack of dialogue among those who study institutions at
different levels of social organization. Recent efforts to initiate comparisons
relating to institutional issues arising in smallscale, local societies and in
international society make it clear both that there is much to be gained from
such comparisons and that there is much to be learned about how to
communicate effectively among members of the two research communities
(Keohane and Ostrom eds. 1995). When we add the ideas of those who study
the physical and biological systems with which social systems interact, the
problem of communication increases significantly. Recent efforts to identify
and compare concepts used to describe the principal attributes of biophysical
systems and social systems demonstrate that there is ample room for
productive exchanges among these research communities (Cleveland et. al.
1996). But the results to date indicate as well that we have only begun to
tackle the problems of achieving effective communication across these
intellectual boundaries.
To make progress on the IDGC research agenda we must devise a
common discourse that will allow these diverse groups to form a coherent
community endeavoring to expand our knowledge of the effectiveness and
the robustness of social institutions. The goal here is not to tell individual
researchers what to study or to influence their choice of variables, models, or
cases. Rather, the objective of this effort is to form an intellectual community
whose members know each other's work, employ a common discourse in
framing their research problems, and make a concerted effort to compare and
contrast the results they obtain. There is no simple recipe that will ensure
success in the pursuit of this goal. But the challenge is one that will require
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careful consideration in the formulation of the IDGC Science Plan and that
deserves attention on an ongoing basis among those working on specific
projects within the framework of this research program.
9.2 Achieving Analytic Harmonization
Because the bulk of the existing research on institutions takes the form
of self-contained case studies, students of social practices have not made a
concerted effort to harmonize their concepts in the interests of conducting
comparative analyses of the effectiveness and robustness of arrangements
operating in different settings. There are three distinct problems here that
need attention. Individual analysts have often adopted their own concepts
rather than adapting a common conceptual framework for use in their own
work. There is no standard set of concepts available for use in describing the
attributes of social institutions, much less common ways of characterizing the
effectiveness and robustness of institutions. Even when they do employ the
same terminology, students of institutions often invest individual terms with
different content. A prominent case in point is the concept of effectiveness,
which has been used to refer to problem solving, goal attainment, compliance,
behavioral change, and so forth (Young 1994a). Beyond this, there are many
differences at the level of operationalization, even among those who use
concepts similarly in analytic terms. How do we operationalize the concept of
rules, for instance, especially in cases where rules in use differ from those set
forth in constitutive documents or include prescriptions that have evolved
through informal processes. These problems are relevant to all research on
social institutions But studies designed to produce quantitative findings
relating to the effectiveness and robustness of institutions require a
particularly strong commitment to solving all of them.
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It would be undesirable to impose a conceptual straightjacket on
students of social institutions. Any effort to do so would undoubtedly
backfire in any case. Yet the process familiar to natural scientists as the
pursuit of calibration or harmonization is just as important as a basis for the
efforts of social scientists to develop cumulative knowledge about the roles
institutions play as drivers of global change and as determinants of human
responses to largescale biophysical processes. We need reasonable assurance
that we are measuring the same things in our efforts to understand the
effectiveness and the robustness of institutions. This is particularly true of
research dealing with different levels of social organization both because
there has not been much exchange of ideas among those looking at the
operation of institutions in local societies, national societies, and international
society and because there is good reason to believe that some of the most
important scientific advances to be made by a program dealing with the
Institutional Dimensions of Global Change will come from systematic
comparisons of the operation of institutions across levels of social
organization.
9.3 Developing Appropriate Databases
Another step that is needed to carry out the research program
described in this report involves the development of one or several databases
containing comparable information on a growing collection of institutions
operating at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Such databases will prove
helpful to those conducting holistic case studies focused on particular
institutions and desiring to compare their findings with the results of parallel
studies of other institutions. At the same time, databases are essential for
those looking at specific aspects of institutions and desiring to develop and
test empirical generalizations across sizable numbers of discrete cases.
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Consider, for example, the needs of analysts interested in matters like links
between the decision rules institutions employ and their capacity to solve
problems; between the distribution of material resources among the members
and institutional effectiveness, and between the stringency of rules governing
the adjustment of institutions and the robustness of such arrangements.
Hypotheses pertaining to these matters are of obvious interest to those
concerned with the institutional dimensions of global change, and they can
only be evaluated systematically as data sets including the relevant variables
for a sizable number of cases become available.
The creation of a database of this sort is a labor-intensive, timeconsuming, and costly process. It requires a willingness on the part of
researchers and funders alike to make major investments of time and
resources during the developmental stage, with no guarantee that there will
be large payoffs in due course accruing to the community of analysts seeking
to explore specific hypotheses dealing with social institutions, much less to
the creators of the database themselves. Under the circumstances, it is
essential to treat the development of databases as a common enterprise to be
fostered and sustained by all those interested in constructing empirical
generalizations relating to institutional arrangements. In this connection, it is
worth emphasizing that several efforts to construct databases of interest to the
IDGC project are already underway. Prominent examples include (1) The
International Forestry Research Initiative (IFRI) focused on smallscale systems
and based at Indiana University and (2) the International Regimes Database
(IRD) oriented toward macro-level arrangements and developed under the
auspices of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
It is possible that these ongoing efforts can be adjusted to meet at least some
of the needs of the IDGC core project. They can also provide numerous
insights that will prove helpful to those seeking to assemble the computerized
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databases needed to back up a systematic effort to broaden and deepen our
understanding of the institutional dimensions of global change.
9.4 Formulating Design Principles
A major concern of a core project on the Institutional Dimensions of
Global Change will be to build up a collection of design principles that
address links between various features of institutional arrangements and the
achievement of effectiveness and robustness (Underdal 1990). We want to
know, for example, whether there are well-defined connections between
institutional effectiveness and design features relating to such matters as the
character of an institution's rules, decisionmaking processes, implementation
review mechanisms, and non-compliance procedures. Conclusions cast in this
form will constitute the applied payoff of the research program under
consideration here. They can help in pinpointing features of existing
institutions that are likely to give rise to anthropogenic disturbances in
important ecosystems as well as in designing new institutions needed to
ensure that human responses to global changes achieve the intended results.
At the same time, the effort to distill design principles from the study of social
institutions is of great interest to members of the scientific community. Such
an effort bears directly on central theoretical questions regarding whether and
how institutions matter as determinants of collective outcomes as well as the
relative importance of endogenous versus exogenous factors in accounting for
the impacts of institutions in cases where they clearly do matter.
The effort to construct design principles should engage all those
interested in the institutional dimensions of global change and for two distinct
reasons. There are, in the first instance, questions about the range or scope of
design principles. Are there some design principles that are universal in the
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sense that they apply across all levels of social organization, across different
conditions regarding institutional linkages, and across a variety of biophysical
and social domains? Obviously, such principles should be prized above
others, so long as they are not too abstract to apply to concrete situations.
Other design principles may apply to identifiable subsets of the universe of
institutions, like cases featuring horizontal linkages or coordination problems.
Though less desirable than universal principles, such restricted principles are
also of considerable value to practitioners, and they may prove a good deal
easier to devise than universal principles. Regular efforts to compare notes
about the development of design principles should help as well in the
ongoing effort to differentiate between real connections and spurious
correlations with respect to the impact of social institutions on collective
outcomes. A design principle that seems to work in some situations but fails
in others, for example, can trigger additional studies that prove fruitful in
uncovering spurious relationships and in contextualizing design principles in
a way that should help practitioners to avoid the misuse of prescriptive
findings. Under the circumstances, it would be appropriate for a core project
on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Change to organize regular
workshops in which both analysts and practitioners gather to discuss the
formulation of design principles and the results flowing from their
application to a variety of settings.
10. Connections to Ongoing Programs
No matter how successful it becomes, a core project on the Institutional
Dimensions of Global Change cannot and should not dominate the overall
research agenda on institutions in the social sciences. The initiative under
consideration here is predicated on the observation that a considerable
volume of high quality research on institutions has already been carried out,
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is currently in progress, or is presently on the drawing boards. The most
effective approach for IHDP to adopt in this area is to connect active
researchers in ways that encourage synergy and add value to work already
underway or in the planning stage under other auspices. The major goals of
an IHDP core project on institutions are thus to (1) integrate, extend, and
refine existing findings that are relevant to global environmental change, (2)
stimulate, focus, and coordinate research efforts so that they will help fill
important gaps or pursue particularly promising areas of study, and (3) bring
this intellectual capital to bear on substantive problems that the IHDP or the
IGBP has selected for emphasis (e.g. LUCC, IT, and LOICZ).
A number of procedures are available to address such matters, and it
will be essential for the IDGC core project to take full advantage of these
procedures. First, the project should establish a Scientific Planning Committee
composed of active researchers interested both in the problems of scale,
interplay, and fit and in the substantive issues associated with LUCC, IT, and
LOICZ. Second, the project should arrange to assemble analysts who are at
the research design stage of new projects in the interests of encouraging
individual PIs to harmonize their efforts, even while allowing ample scope for
those in charge of specific projects to pursue their own objectives. Third, the
IDGC project should organize periodic workshops in which those who are
completing projects can compare notes on their findings and discuss the
implications of these findings both for subsequent research and for the
problems confronting policymakers. Fourth, the project should facilitate
regular contacts between IDGC researchers and the leaders of the LUCC, IT,
and LOICZ projects in order to explore the applicability of IDGC findings to
the concerns of the other projects and to identify specific institutional issues or
problems that have surfaced in research conducted under LUCC, IT, and
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LOICZ and that would benefit from systematic consideration on the part of
specialists on institutions.
In the course of developing this report, we have identified a number of
existing projects that are concerned with matters of interest to a core project
on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Change. We list a number of
prominent examples here on the explicit understanding that we have not
conducted a systematic survey of ongoing projects in this field and that we
would welcome information about other projects that should be added to this
list as the IDGC project evolves.
Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental
Change (CIPEC). This new organization at Indiana University, funded by
the National Science Foundation under its human dimensions of global
change program, administers both the International Forestry Research
Initiative (IFRI) directed by Elinor Ostrom and the land use mapping project
directed by Emilio Moran.
Beijer Institute Program on Property Rights and the Performance of
Natural Systems.
This multi-year effort has explored a range of issues
relating to resource regimes operating at different levels of social organization
and devoted particular attention to what we have described in this report as
the problem of fit (Hanna, Folke, and Maler eds. 1996).
Foundation for International Environmental Law and Organization
(FIELD). This organization directs particular attention to the legal aspects of
international resource regimes. It has sponsored important work on the
problems of implementing international environmental accords and eliciting
compliance from domestic actors (Cameron et. al. 1995).
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International Regimes Database.
This computerized information
system was created as part of the International Environmental Commitments
(IEC) Project at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. It is
intended to offer an ongoing source of data on a wide range of variables of
interest to analysts seeking to formulate and test hypotheses dealing with
international institutions (Levy, Young, and Zuern 1995).
Human Driving Forces of Environmental Change in Southeast Asia
and the Implications for Sustainable Development. This project constitutes
the human dimensions component of a joint IGBP/IHDP/SARCS initiative
focusing on human/environment interactions in Southeast Asia. The project
places particular emphasis on issues pertaining to land use and the coastal
zone.
Program on Sustainable Use of Living Resources of the International
Arctic Science Committee (IASC). This program directs attention to large
terrestrial and marine ecosystems in which humans are major players. Special
attention is given to grazing systems and fish/marine mammal/human
systems and to the management practices that have emerged to regulate
human/environment relations in these settings.
Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Committee on the Human
Dimensions of Global Change. This ongoing committee played a leading
role in early efforts to frame research on the human dimensions of global
change. It was the principal sponsor of the first Open Meeting of the Human
Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community held in
June 1995.
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11. Next Steps
This document describes a single step in an ongoing process. The IHDP
Scientific Committee, at its May 1995 meeting, asked us to prepare a short
memorandum exploring how the study of institutions might fit into the
evolving IHDP program. After reviewing this memorandum at its September
1995 meeting, the committee asked us to develop our ideas into a preliminary
scoping report. To respond to this request, we organized a small workshop at
Dartmouth College in January 1996 and prepared a preliminary Scoping
Report on institutions on the basis of the discussion occurring there. The
IHDP Scientific Committee considered that report at its May 1996 meeting,
asked us to produce a full Scoping Report by the end of the calendar year, and
decided to attach priority to the Institutional Dimensions of Global Change
(IDGC) as a prospective IHDP core project. Specifically, the committee
concluded that the IDGC project fits well into its overall strategy of
integrating projects dealing with substantive themes (e.g. LUCC, IT) with
projects that address cross-cutting concerns (e.g. institutions, individual
perceptions/ values). This document constitutes the full Scoping Report
developed in response to the committee's request.
Assuming that the committee approves this product and decides to
move ahead with a core project on institutions, we see the following sequence
of steps needed to achieve this goal:
Consultation with the science community. Regular consultation with
the relevant science community is essential at all stages in the development of
a global change core project. We have already initiated this process with
sessions at the June 1996 meeting of the International Association for the
Study of Common Property (IASCP), which was attended by 80-90 people,
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and at the August 1996 workshop on "Globality in the Context of Human
Dimensions of Global Change," which took place at Linkoping University. At
this stage, we have plans to present the full Scoping Report at the annual
meeting of the International Studies Association in March 1997 and at the
Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change
Research Community to be held in June 1997 at the International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis.
Establishment of a Scientific Planning Committee.
Subject to
approval of the IHDP Scientific Committee, we propose to form an IDGC
Scientific Planning Committee early in 1997. Initially, this group would
function as an informal advisory panel with a mandate to bring a variety of
perspectives into the planning process and to provide feedback on documents
emerging from this ongoing process. The planning committee would be asked
to participate actively in the development of the IDGC Science Plan during
1997. We anticipate that this planning group will also form the nucleus of a
more formal Scientific Steering Committee once IDGC is established officially
as an IHDP core project.
Formulation of a Science Plan. The next step in the planning process
involves moving from this full Scoping Report to a substantive Science Plan
for IDGC. We propose to organize a workshop during the summer of 1997
that will bring together about 25 researchers representing a range of
perspectives on institutions as well as the substantive concerns of LUCC, IT,
and LOICZ for a focused discussion of the contents of the IDGC Science Plan.
Each participant will receive a copy of the full Scoping Report well in advance
of the workshop and be asked to come to the workshop prepared to address
specific research opportunities relating to some part of the agenda articulated
in the Scoping Report. On the basis of these presentations and the exchange of
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views that they stimulate, we will prepare a draft IDGC Science Plan for
consideration by the IHDP Scientific Committee during the fall of 1997.
Assuming the committee approves the plan, we will revise it and prepare it
for publication as an IHDP/IGBP Report early in 1998. We have submitted
parallel proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United
States and to DG XII of the Commission of the EC in Europe for funding to
cover the cost of the 1997 workshop.
Publication of an edited collection. If the presentations made at the
summer workshop are of sufficiently high quality, we will collect them and
arrange for their publication either as an edited volume or as a special issue of
an appropriate journal (the editor of the International Political Science Review
has already expressed interest in this prospect). Such a collection could begin
with a revised version of the analytic portions of this Scoping Report and
include a set of chapters outlining approaches to the problems of scale,
interplay, and fit as well as a set of chapters discussing the relevance of these
concerns to the research agendas of LUCC, IT, and LOICZ.
Initiation of a Core Project Office. Once the IDGC Science Plan is
approved and prepared for publication as an IHDP/IGBP report, the next
step will be to open a Core Project Office to work with the IDGC Steering
Committee in administering the IDGC project. We expect to apply for funding
to support a Core Project Office during the second half of 1997 with the goal
of opening this office early in 1998.
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