Institutional Flexibility Research Articles

Indonesian Traditional Market Flexibility Amidst State Promoted Market Competition

The penetration of modern supermarkets is believed to be the cause of the declining role of traditional markets and street vendors in Indonesia. Nevertheless, the competition between state-promoted markets and traditional markets is rarely discussed, both adaptation of market institution and strategy of market actors. This research outlined a theoretical understanding of the dynamics of traditional markets, along the concepts of market flexibility as an adaptation strategy and coordination problems as market actor strategies. The researchers empirically reflect the strategies of four traditional vegetable markets that still survive from tight competition—both the market itself as a social institution, and the strategies of actors involved in market transactions. The traditional market builds flexibility by: (1) Specifying commodities, (2) segmenting customers, (3) changing market operating hour, (4) modifying transportation to operate more efficiently, and (5) low cost market management. At the actor level, competition problems are resolved by utilizing an emotional sentiment of friendship social relations; the formation of prices is determined by developing effective networks of information; and the cooperation problem is dealt with by building a system of punishment and reward based on informal mechanisms. This finding verifies the thesis stating that market competitiveness is determined by institutional flexibility against competition and the ability of market actors to build effective social interactions to maintain market sustainability. Based on the above explanation, further research needs to be focused on calculating how much efficiency is built due to market flexibility, both the transaction cost and the production cost in a quantitative manner. At the actor level, it is necessary to delineate the strategies being built, whether based on pure rational or economic and moral or non-economic considerations in solving coordination problems in the market.

Bridging critical institutionalism and fragmented authoritarianism in China: An analysis of centralized water policies and their local implementation in semi‐arid irrigation districts

AbstractThis paper attempts to bridge critical institutionalism and fragmented authoritarianism in China. Moving beyond the predictive functionalist perspective and the overemphasis on state primacy, the paper focuses on how top‐down water policies are exercised by local agencies, collective communities, and individuals at the county level and below. Through a case of irrigation management in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, this paper posits that institutional bricolage and fragmentation are prevalent despite the imposition of the authoritarian state. Moreover, it shows that local water policy implementation is reshaped by various contested discourse, the pursuit of different interests, social relations, and broad transformative forces. This high degree of diversity not only manifests an increasing institutional flexibility, as water policies are operated outside China's hierarchical bureaucratic system, but also is embedded in an era of socio‐economic transformation where the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and neo‐liberalization have changed the dynamics of rural governance.

Geoarchaeology in China: Historical Trends and Future Prospects

Over the past century, the integration of earth science methods and concepts into archaeology has fundamentally changed the nature of archaeological inquiry to include studies that focus on archaeological site formation processes, landscape evolution, and human–environmental interactions. However, the development of geoarchaeology—the interdisciplinary field of earth science and archaeology—was not an inevitability; rather, it was mediated through individuals and institutions. We attempt to isolate core institutional components that facilitated the integration of earth science and archaeology by discussing the development of a geoarchaeological research tradition outside a Western context. Here, we examine the historical trends and future prospects of geoarchaeological research in China. As archaeology becomes more global and diverse, understanding the factors that have historically combined the fields of earth science and archaeology is a necessary prerequisite for catalyzing interdisciplinary research. We argue that China’s increasingly flexible research culture, greater access to scientific methods, and long history of international and interdisciplinary collaboration have contributed to the expansion of the geoarchaeological community. In conclusion, we suggest that institutional flexibility, international exchanges, and training across disciplines are essential ingredients that foster interdisciplinary research in archaeological inquiry.

Climate adaptation approaches and key policy characteristics: Cases from South Asia

This paper analyses and assesses how existing policies and approaches in South Asia consider long-term climate change adaptation. Presently, it is unclear what approaches are used in the existing policies to cope with the future climatic changes. Our research framework consists of two components. First, we identify and define key characteristics of adaptation policy approaches based on a review of scientific journal articles. The key characteristics identified are institutional flexibility, adaptive nature, scalability and reflexivity. Second, we analyse the presence of these characteristics in the climate change adaptation policies of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Our findings show that the four South Asian countries contribute to only 8% of the total journal articles on adaptation policy, with least papers representing Pakistan and Nepal. Reviewing the adaptation policies, we find that except for the Climate Change Policy of Nepal, none of the policies discusses transboundary scale adaptation approaches. The identified adaptation policies lack focus on shared transboundary resources between the countries, and instead focus at national or sub-national scale. This is reflected by relatively low scores for the scalability characteristic. All the countries show high scores for institutional flexibility, suggesting that changing roles and responsibilities between government agencies for adaptation planning and implementation is accepted in the four countries. We conclude that to prevent a loss of flexibility and to promote scalability of shared transboundary resources, policy approaches such as anticipatory governance, robust decision-making, and adaptation pathways can be useful for long-term climate change adaptation.

Of Monarchs and Islamists: The ‘Refo-lutionary’ Promise of the PJD Islamists and Regime Control in Morocco

The article engages the literature on political parties in semi-authoritarian regimes to examine the state and Islamists’ strategies in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings in Morocco. The pace of state reforms and the regime’s institutional flexibility pre-Arab spring, the cosmetic reforms in the new constitution, and the 2011 legislative elections so far have insulated the Moroccan regime against any meaningful constitutional and institutional changes. However, the electoral contests produced an opportunity for the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) to enter the Moroccan political scene at the helm of the government. Using extensive field research and interviews with PJD members, I argue that the party is pursuing a pragmatic ‘refolutionary’ strategy within the regime’s constitutional rules of the game, aiming to mitigate the authoritarian features of the government while tackling, with limited success, Morocco’s major socio-economic issues. Ultimately, the regime’s control over the political system continues to influence Moroccan politics. The monarchy has a long tradition of managing opposition parties through cooptation and confinement, allowing opposition parties some stake in power, while the king and the palace’s shadow government of advisers are firmly in control.

Adapting Tropical Forest Policy and Practice in the Context of the Anthropocene: Opportunities and Challenges for the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico

Tropical forest management increasingly is challenged by multiple, complex, intersecting, and in many cases unprecedented changes in the environment that are triggered by human activity. Many of these changes are associated with the Anthropocene—a new geologic epoch in which humans have become a dominating factor in shaping the biosphere. Ultimately, as human activity increasingly influences systems and processes at multiple scales, we are likely to see more extraordinary and surprising events, making it difficult to predict the future with the level of precision and accuracy needed for broad-scale management prescriptions. In this context of increasing surprise and uncertainty, learning, flexibility, and adaptiveness are essential to securing ecosystem resilience and sustainability, particularly in complex systems such as tropical forests. This article examines the experience to date with and potential for collaborative, adaptive land and resource management in the El Yunque National Forest (EYNF)—the only tropical forest in the U.S. National Forest System. The trajectory of EYNF policy and practice over time and its capacity for learning, flexibility, and adaptiveness to change and surprise are analyzed through an historical institutionalism approach. EYNF policies and practices have shifted from an early custodial approach that focused mostly on protection and prevention to a top-down, technical approach that eventually gave way to an ecosystem approach that has slowly incorporated more flexible, adaptive, and active learning elements. These shifts in EYNF management mostly have been reactive and incremental, with some rarer, rapid changes primarily in response to significant changes in national-level policies, but also to local level conditions and changes in them. Looking to the future, it seems the EYNF may be better positioned than ever before to address increasing uncertainty and surprise at multiple scales. However, it must be able to count on the resources necessary for implementing adaptive, collaborative forest management in a tropical setting and on the institutional and organizational space and flexibility to make swift adjustments or course corrections in response to system changes and surprises.

Creating institutional flexibility for adaptive water management: insights from two management agencies

Adaptive management is an experimental approach used by water management agencies around the world to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems. The effectiveness of the approach can often be constrained by inflexible institutional arrangements. In this paper we compare two cases where agencies have implemented adaptive management to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems. Our aim was to understand practitioners' perceptions of how institutional flexibility can be created for adaptive management. We interviewed 14 adaptive management practitioners working in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia and 14 practitioners in Southern Florida, United States of America. We found that in both cases, just enough flexibility was created to enable experimentation, but informal institutional arrangements tended to constrain adaptive management. We also found that adaptive management was effective when an agency adopted collaborative and distributed leadership, but these leadership styles were difficult to sustain, and not always appropriate when attempting to create institutional flexibility. Our results illustrate how agencies, stakeholders and researchers can develop a shared understanding of how to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems, which in turn, helps create institutional flexibility for an agency to manage adaptively.

How does availability of county-level healthcare services shape terminal decline in well-being?

Both lifespan psychology and life course sociology highlight that contextual factors influence individual functioning and development. In the current study, we operationalize context as county-level care services in inpatient and outpatient facilities (e.g., number of care facilities, privacy in facilities) and investigate how the care context shapes well-being in the last years of life. To do so, we combine 29 waves of individual-level longitudinal data on life satisfaction from now deceased participants in the nationwide German Socio-Economic Panel Study (N=4557; age at death: M=73.35, SD=14.20; 47% women) with county-level data from the Federal Statistical Office. Results from three-level growth models revealed that having more inpatient care facilities, more employees per resident, and more staff in administration are each uniquely associated with higher late-life well-being, independent of key individual (age at death, gender, education, disability) and county (affluence, demographic composition) characteristics. Number of employees in physical care, residential comfort, and flexibility and care indicators in outpatient institutions were not found to be associated with levels or change in well-being. We take our results to provide empirical evidence that some contextual factors shape well-being in the last years of life and discuss possible routes how local care services might alleviate terminal decline.

The EU and NATO in Georgia: complementary and overlapping security strategies in a precarious environment

ABSTRACTFocusing on fragile Georgia since the early 2000s, the article takes a country-centred perspective on EU–NATO inter-organisationalism. It outlines the regional strategies of these core Western security institutions and assesses their complementarity and overlap across three sets of tasks: defence and empowerment, crisis management, and security sector reform. While there is hardly functional overlap in the first and second sets, in the third the EU and NATO intersect to a considerable degree. Also, there is no significant inter-organisational cooperation over Georgia. One key conclusion is that while field-level overlap clearly jeopardises institutional effectiveness, overlapping toolboxes – as in crisis management – allow for institutional flexibility when one international organisation setting offers reputational or practical advantages. Against this backdrop, a case can be made contra propositions of merging the Common Security and Defence Policy and NATO.

Micro-dynamics in regional transition paths to sustainability - Insights from the Augsburg region

While there has recently been an increased interest in urban and regional transitions to sustainability, there are little profound insights about the emergence, design and enforcement of regional transition paths to sustainability (RTPS). The latter are characterized by organizational and institutional dynamics that affect multiple regimes and cannot fully be captured with the niche-regime categories of the multilevel perspective (MLP). This paper is therefore based on recent approaches from evolutionary economic geography (EEG) that focus on how actors at the micro-level use the plasticity of paths to enact change. The transition path and underlying micro-dynamics over more than 30 years in the Augsburg region revealed in an empirical study are visualized in the form of a transition topology. The results show that RTPS do not exclusively originate in protected spaces. Actors use the interpretative flexibility of institutions and establish organizational proximity between different institutional logics thereby eroding institutional consolidations and allowing new configurations within the path. Gradual institutional changes lead to more fundamental changes in social practices over the long run.

Fragmented Agrarian Space: Building Blocks and Modernisation Trajectories. The Case of Slovenia

Abstract Production, processing and consumption within Slovenian agrarian space are fragmented due to physical constraints (72.4% of the territory categorised as ANC) and socio-geographic factors. Based on available data, five essential building blocks of contemporary Slovenian agrarian space (available land, change management, integrated circular economy, adjustable policies, and flexibility of institutions) are discussed. Interrelations among the building blocks shape the modernisation trajectories of approx. 70,000 agricultural holdings in Slovenia. The coexistence of three modernisation trajectories, i.e. practised autarky, various forms of pluri-activity, and small-scale intensive and innovative modernisation, creates a complex mosaic. The governance of multifunctional and multi-structured agrarian space is becoming more demanding.

Institutional Variations in Faculty Demographic Profiles

This paper proposes that many of the academic, financial and management challenges facing higher education are the result of a group of inter-related financial and demographic variables which are combining to produce a "ratchet" effect. Each twist of the ratchet reduces the institutional flexibility necessary for making adaptive responses with respect to revenue and expenses, renewal, and diversity which are required to avoid a further tightening of the ratchet. Another decade of decline may be ahead for Canadian Universities unless the dynamic interplay of the variables responsible for the ratchet can be reversed. Toward this end, the methodology of "institutional variations" is proposed, and is illustrated through an analysis of the faculty demographic profiles of nine Canadian universities. The proposed methodology requires focusing on collecting specific, descriptive information about individual institutions, rather than the usual strategy of collecting normative, aggregated information about higher education in general.

Institutional Ownership and Flexibility in Payout Policy: Evidence from the Financial Crisis

I study the role of institutional stock ownership in facilitating flexibility in firms’ payout policy by examining payout reductions during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Treating the financial crisis as a systemic, negative shock to firms’ access to capital markets, I find that firms with higher institutional holdings were more likely to reduce payout to their shareholders. The payout reduction is overwhelmingly driven by cuts in share repurchases attesting to the flexible nature of share repurchases as documented in the literature. The findings are robust to different measures of institutional ownership. I attempt to further examine the mechanism behind this effect by incorporating several proxies for information asymmetry in my analysis and conclude that the primary driver is the mitigation of information asymmetry brought about by increase in institutional shareholding. However, my findings are not inconsistent with institutional investors reducing agency conflicts between management and shareholders.

Banking Crisis and the Japanese Legal Framework

This paper presents an overview of the Japanese system to deal with the distress of banks, providing a classification of the regulation and remedies based on the level of systemic risk of the troubled entity. The paper differentiates between the types of actions available and analyses in detail the instruments and their application. While the regulation is disperse and its apprehension is complicated for a foreign reader, Japan counts on a modern, thorough and adequate group of institutions and instruments to tackle bank distress. Its most notable feature is the proportionality of measures and the flexibility enjoyed by a resolution authority that may accommodate its intervention to the characteristics of the case and the degree of contagion risk. Although mainly inspired by the American model, the system is compared with the new European framework and FSB recommendations are considered. Although a few elements could be reconsidered, its high institutional level and flexibility make the Japanese system one capable of dealing with financial crises at both national and international levels.

Water Banks: What Have We Learnt from the International Experience?

In recent decades, the use of economic instruments has been promoted as a way to improve water demand management, required due to the difficulty of further supply increases. Against this backdrop, this paper analyses the potential of water banks as a type of water market that can provide institutional flexibility in the allocation of water resources among different users. Research has involved an extensive review of the literature, which has allowed us to identify different types of water banks that operate around the world, as well as an analysis of the experiences of water banks implemented to date, in order to assess the performance of this economic instrument in improving water management. This has provided evidence that water banks, if properly implemented, can be a useful tool for improving governance of water resources. Finally, the analysis has enabled us to propose a number of guidelines on how to improve the implementation of water banks in different countries around the world.

UNASUR: Regional Pluralism as a Strategic Outcome

South America features a very particular regional architecture, one which is characterised by the proliferation and overlapping of regional organisations, with UNASUR at the centre. UNASUR is an intergovernmental organisation with no supranational institutions. The article will argue that institutional flexibility, which is both a core element of South American regionalism and a specific institutional feature of UNASUR, corresponds with the key interests of the founding members of this organisation. Based on this assumption, the article will analyse the strategies and policies of the various Argentinean governments during the period when UNASUR was created (1999–2008). It will differentiate between a ‘uniaxial’ regional integration approach structured around one thematic axis and a ‘multiaxial’ approach evolving along multiple axes in parallel; it will also ask to what extent the new regional architecture corresponds to the core interests of that country. For the Argentinean government, it was important to ensure that UNASUR would not constrain its foreign policy options. The result was the variable geometry codified in the UNASUR Constitutive Treaty.

Does Institutional Design Matter? A Study of Trade Effectiveness and PTA Flexibility/Rigidity

This article examines the trade effect of flexibility design features within preferential trading arrangements (PTAs). Using a gravity model of bilateral trade that incorporates multilateral trade resistance, we report three main results. First, unconstrained escape provisions undermine the effectiveness of PTAs when it comes to increasing trade. Second, adding some restrictions to these escape provisions more than offsets the negative effect of unconstrained escape, leading to more effective PTAs than those without escape options. Third, adding more restrictions beyond a certain point serves only to make PTAs less effective. Thus, both too much institutional flexibility and too much institutional rigidity reduces the ability of PTAs to promote trade. However, fitting these results to the descriptive data makes it appear that most PTAs would be even more trade effective if they included greater restrictions on the use of their escape provisions. Consequently, it appears that policymakers generally choose fewer escape restrictions than would be optimal in terms of trade performance.

Epistemic governance and epistemic innovation policy in higher education

Epistemic governance and epistemic innovation policy formulate a critique against too-narrowly defined approaches to governance, where governance follows one-sidedly bureaucratic or technocratic considerations. Instead, epistemic governance (also quality management and quality enhancement) and epistemic innovation policy should be regarded as a plea for a more comprehensive understanding, where the explicit-making, comprehension and reflection of knowledge, knowledge production, and knowledge application are keys for a successful governing and governance. For the further progress of advanced knowledge society, advanced knowledge economy, and advanced knowledge democracy, universities and the higher education sectors are crucial for driving development. How should the governance of higher education, the quality enhancement of universities, and the careers of academic faculty (the academic profession) be organized? Epistemic governance introduces here a novel approach and understanding. Epistemic governance emphasizes that the underlying epistemic structure, the underlying epistemic base, or the underlying epistemic paradigms (knowledge paradigms) of those organizations, institutions, or systems (sectors), which should be governed, are being addressed. This defines a benchmark and set of criteria for internal and external governance in higher education that is interested in applying a good, effective, and sustainable governance. Quality assurance, quality enhancement, and quality management of higher education, from the perspective of epistemic governance, should also orient themselves to quality and quality dimensions that cross-refer to the underlying epistemic structure of higher education. In a traditional understanding, the academic career patterns of the academic core faculty at universities follow a tenure-track logic. Cross-employment (multi-employment), on the contrary, refers to academic faculty (the academic profession) with simultaneous employment contracts to more than one organization only within or both inside and outside of higher education. Epistemic governance, in combination with crossemployment, should add to the organizational flexibility and creativity of universities and other higher education institutions, supporting the integration of a pluralism and diversity of knowledge production (basic research in the context of knowledge application and innovation), the formation of nonlinear innovation networks, and providing a rationale for a new type of academic career model.

External and Public Debt Crises

The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state government indebtedness was low, and the crisis had no spillovers to the private sector. We show theoretically and empirically that these different debt experiences result from the interplay between differences in the ability of governments to interfere in private external debt contracts and differences in the flexibility of state fiscal institutions.

Assessing Resistance to Volunteered Geographic Information Reporting within Local Government

AbstractUsing volunteered geographic information (VGI) as a cost‐saving environmental monitoring and public participation mechanism has been thought to be a proof of concept to assist environmental decision‐making with insufficient managerial resources. However, research literature also often found institutional resistance when implementing VGI as part of the decision‐making process. This research develops a conceptual framework as the foundation to conduct a cross‐case comparison for four empirical cases in recreation and invasive species monitoring, but general enough for other such case comparisons. The VGI Reporting Assessment Framework (VGI‐RAF) adopted aspects of the Decision Situation Assessment (DSA) framework as the foundation to address institutional flexibility, stakeholder dynamics, and technical considerations. Using a cross‐case comparison can accumulate deep observations from cases and increase validity of insights through comparing processes. Results show that eight aspects of the VGI‐RAF reveal the suitability of embedding voluntary information within existing institutional decision‐making processes. VGI‐RAF depicts considerations for: (1) existing participation arrangements, (2) institutional arrangements, (3) managers’ needs and stakeholder expectation, and (4) interaction mechanism and technical needs. The cross‐comparison results indicate that a public participation mechanism should be accompanied by VGI development to increase effectiveness. Institutional arrangements should match local government's information needs with participants’ expectations. Knowledge gaps between institutional information needs and volunteer knowledge should be filled through technology enhancements. For ease of implementation and to promote long‐term success, we recommend that volunteered information be connected with existing communication channels to minimize changes to existing information systems.