"Institutions of Sustainability" as an Analytical Framework and Research Heuristics
Final Report Abstract
Whether or not interaction between human actors and their social, natural and physical environment produces, maintains or weakens sustainable systems, crucially depends on their behavior. The patterns of behavior humans follow and in particular their economic choices rely to a large extent on what social constructions actors and societies have developed over time and how these in turn have shaped their reasoning and visioning. It has found its expression in how institutions such as traditions and religions, norms and rules, languages and discourses, trust and commitment, mental models and believes emerge, are practiced and change. Such processes of social construction and deconstruction are crucially conditioned and influenced by attributes of the physical and natural environment. The Project started by clarifying a basic understanding of "framing research situations by analytical frameworks" by distinguishing three core components: intention, meaning and relevance. Then it explored the state of the art regarding analytical frameworks actually used for structuring research problems. Various scientific communities deal with the knowledge area institutional analysis of social-ecological systems, however, they approach their research issues in quite different ways mainly because they use different analytical frameworks. Thus, main analytical frameworks were compared and incommensurability between them identified. This led a strategic conclusion: Any attempt at developing a general framework for the most important institutional constructions that shape societies relationships to its biophysical, non-human environment are deemed to fail, if it is predominantly based on an analytical framework - including its specific framing, heuristic and language - that just one scientific community or group of scholars has developed and is used to. Therefore, we argued that the appropriateness of multiple analytical frameworks should be recognized. Obviously, which analytical framework develops in any scientific community dealing with institutional analysis of social-ecological systems depends on the activities scholars focus on. These activities determine what transformations and transactions to be governed by institutions are the subjects of institutional analysis. This has enabled relevant conclusions for example regarding the activating role of the physical linkages of actors to ecological and technical systems dynamics in action situations. Analyzing the entire transaction-interdependence-institutions nexus is emphasized as important contribution to the microfoundations of Institutional Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems.
Publications
- (2011). Analyzing Institutions and Governance Structures for the Interactions between Natural and Social Systems: Suitability of Different Analytical Frameworks. Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) (Hrsg.): Dokumentation & Materialien, Bd. 66. Bonn, 37-48
Hagedorn, Konrad
- (2013). Biodiversity and Cultural Ecosystem Services. In: Levin, S. A. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Biodiversity. Waltham, MA: Academic Press, 332-340
Gatzweiler Franz W. and Konrad Hagedorn
- (2013). Natural Resource Management: The role of co-operative institutions and governance. Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity 2 (1), 101-121
Hagedorn, Konrad
