Contenu du sommaire

This article introduces the special issue of the International Review of Public Policy devoted to “Exploring Institutional Dynamics with the Institutional Grammar”. In doing so, it: (i) provides a brief introduction to the Institutional Grammar as an increasingly prominent tool for the study of institutions that govern social systems, such as public policies and social conventions; (ii) describes evolving trends in Institutional Grammar research reflected in and beyond the papers included in the issue; and (iii) discusses analytical trade-offs associated with these trends, with specific reference to special issue papers. This introduction to the special issue thus contextualizes the research presented in the issue, while also offering insights and guidance regarding the ongoing use and development of the Institutional Grammar.

This paper builds on arguments in policy formulation, the institutional grammar, and comparative public policy by comparing and analyzing the initial and passed versions of 105 bills in six U.S. state legislatures from 2007 through 2017. Our substantive context is oil and gas development. The findings show that shifts from proposed to final versions of legislation tend to expand more than retract in the institutional grammar components, averaged across states. However, this pattern of expansion does not hold when examining all the individual states. Furthermore, no consistent patterns emerge about the changes in the institutional grammar components across states; that is, we see variation across states in what increases or decreases from the proposed to final versions of the legislation. The findings underscore the complexity of policy formulation and the need for theoretical development, the sacrifices in validity when analyzing large samples of public policy using the institutional grammar, and the sizeable variation across states in the content of public policy for the same substantive area. We conclude with a call for a concerted effort using diverse research to begin to generalize and localize knowledge about policy diversity and formulation.

Traditional mixed crop-livestock systems face increased social and environmental uncertainties that arise from both endogenous (i.e., socio-demographics) and exogenous drivers of change (i.e., policy interventions). Adaptations are thus needed for their long-term continuity. The Institutional Analysis and Development Framework's rules typology and the Institutional Grammar are used here to analyze institutional diversity in relation to the use of natural resources and temporal changes in institutions. We used data obtained from qualitative interviews with local farmers within communities in a semiarid area in Spain. Our objective was to analyze the institutional arrangements used over the last few decades relative to sharing common resources (pastures and water) and maintaining public infrastructures. Results show great diversity in institutional arrangements in the farming communities studied, associated mainly with the type of property rights of pastures (communal, public, private) and the level of collective actions needed in response to endogenous and exogenous drivers of change. This study allows us to propose a robust methodological approach to qualitatively analyze institutional arrangements associated with the use of natural resources in farming systems, and to discuss how institutions adapt to policy changes and to new social and environmental realities.

Urban water systems across the United States are facing a variety of challenges to existing supply and demand dynamics. Responding to these challenges in complex socio-environmental systems (SES) requires integrating various types of information – ranging from hydrologic data to political considerations and beyond – into policy and management decisions. However, the design of institutions, i.e., the formal rules in which urban water utilities are embedded, impact the flow of information, especially across diverse actor groups critical to developing and implementing policy or programmatic responses to signal error. This study develops a Bayesian application of the Robustness of Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Framework to analyze how the institutional design of a major U.S. urban water system impacts information flow and, ultimately, the goal of resource-delivery robustness. We utilize process-tracing along with an institutional analysis approach called the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) to parse formal institutions into their semantic and syntactic components and assess how they may influence a system's capacity to respond to changing stressors. Our findings have important implications for the (re)design of institutions that better facilitate information flow among key policy actors and support policy changes that promote sustainable long-term urban water supply.

Within existing regulatory scholarship, limited attention is given to whether and how meso-level, or group, characteristics shape compliance. We advance understanding of meso-level regulatory dynamics by assessing how the composition of regulated groups shapes overall compliance levels within a regulated system, as well as compliance trends among system participants. Specifically, we employ agent-based modeling as a tool suited to understanding emergent behaviors to assess how variation in the social value orientations of farmers participating in the United States' voluntary organic farming regulatory program may shape aggregate and sub-group compliance. We also assess how variation in sanctioning shapes compliance outcomes, shedding light on the interaction between participant motivation and sanctioning mechanisms. We conclude that, for compliance outcomes, the former is more decisive than the latter. The modeling exercise draws on an institutional grammar coding of regulatory design, survey, and interview data. In addition to reporting findings from the modeling exercise in the context of the organic farming regulatory domain, the paper offers insights about leveraging diverse forms of data to inform agent-based modeling, which is particularly appropriate for studying institutional (e.g., policy) and related behavioral dynamics in any governed setting.