Abstract
Institutional work focuses on the role of actors in creating, maintaining, or disrupting institutional structures. The concept has its origin in organisational studies. In this paper, we rethink and redefine institutional work to make it fit for use in the multi-actor and multi-level context of environmental governance. We survey key approaches to institutional change in the literature, and argue that institutional work should have a central place within this theorising. Drawing on the insights from this literature, we argue that studying institutional work should involve a look at both the actions taken by actors, as well as the resulting effects. We identify a critical need for attention to the fundamentally political character of institutional work, the cumulative effects of action taken by multiple actors, and communicative and discursive dimensions. Overall, the concept of institutional work opens up new possibilities for unpacking the longstanding challenge of understanding institutional change in environmental governance.
Highlights
The difficulty of bringing about institutional change is at the heart of a vast range of environmental governance problems, in an increasingly complex, connected, and rapidly changing world.Despite considerable study of the meanings and effects of institutions (e.g. North 1990, 2005; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Hall and Taylor 1996), understanding and explaining institutional change remains a challenge (Heikkila and Gerlak 2005; March and Olsen 2010; Hall 2010; Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Van Assche, Beunen, and Duineveld 2014b)
Institutional work in the context of environmental governance compared to institutional work within a single organisation implies dealing with more different organisational logics, much heavier politics, a broader range of scales to consider, a much broader range of actors to recognise, and engaging with much more unpredictable circumstances and dynamics, much more unpredictable consequences (Mahoney and Thelen 2010; Van Assche, Beunen, and Duineveld 2014a; De Koning 2014)
It has become clear that tackling many kinds of environmental governance problems is anything but easy, and a central reason for this is the challenge of bringing about institutional change
Summary
The difficulty of bringing about institutional change is at the heart of a vast range of environmental governance problems, in an increasingly complex, connected, and rapidly changing world. A key emerging focus in institutional change scholarship is the interplay between actors and institutional structures (Mahoney and Thelen 2010; Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca 2009; Bettini, Brown, and De Haan 2015) This special issue aims to explore new ways of conceptualising this interplay and the way in which it drives institutional change in various policy domains, including water governance, climate change adaptation, and urban planning. It does so by exploring the concept of institutional work, which is defined as the actions through which actors create, maintain, or disrupt institutional structures That doing so opens up new possibilities for tackling the longstanding and fundamental challenge of understanding institutional change in environmental governance
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
