Institutional Grammar Tool Research Articles

Between institutions and narratives: Understanding collective action in innovation policy processes

AbstractExplanations for collective action focus on both institutions and narratives. On the one hand, institutional approaches emphasize the role of rules that guide human behavior. On the other hand, accounting for the narratives through which policy actors make sense of their actions helps in understanding strategic behavior. However, applying institutional and narrative perspectives together is daunting, in part because there has not been a common way to integrate the two approaches. In this article, we draw from Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) to elaborate a novel analytical approach that combines ANT with the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) and the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). We use IGT's and NPF's analytical categories in a processual perspective to examine how policy‐makers strategically use institutions and narratives to create and stabilize a network of actors in innovation policy processes. We illustrate our approach through an in‐depth analysis of the development of a smart city.

More streamlined and targeted. A comparative analysis of the 7th and 8th Environment Action Programmes guiding European environmental policy

Environment Action Programmes (EAP's) are the most important documents defining the environmental policies within the European Union. Their implementation, over the previous 50 years, represented a significant advance in raising eco-friendly awareness and suggesting solutions for environmental problems in the European Union. In this paper, we used Institutional Grammar Tool and network analysis to identify the evolution of EU EAP's by investigating the most recent two programmes (7th Environment Action Programme and 8th Environment Action Programme), particularly in priority objectives, institutional statements, enforcement perspectives, and projected participation of stakeholders. We found that the EU's 8th Environment Action Programme (2021–2030) is further streamlined and target oriented as compared to 7th Environment Action Programme. Furthermore, institutional statements included in the 8th EAP will be implemented predominantly at the levels of European Union and European Commission. On the contrary, in the 7th EAP, the number of institutions, frameworks, and stakeholders is higher and often regional and local (e.g., European Union, Environment Action Programme, European Environment Agency, European Commission, European Parliament, Convention on Biological Diversity, regional authorities, local authorities). The close links of the 8th EAP targets with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the European Green Deal represent an important step towards a greater applicability of environmental policies in the European Union. Our study reveals that comparative analysis of legal documents using Institutional Grammar Tool and network analysis can assist policymakers in assessing the drafting of legal environmental documents and obtain indispensable information about the changes to improve environmental policies.

Global climate as a commons – Decision making on climate change in least developed countries

The international endeavour to prevent climate change requires action from all parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Many least developed countries (LDCs) have prepared nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to implement the Paris Agreement despite economic challenges; however, their level of commitment varies. Understanding the factors that underpin the variation in commitment among low-income countries would facilitate effective agreements and enhance global implementation. The study aimed to determine the degree to which 36 LDCs implemented the Paris Agreement in their NDCs, and the factors that determined the degree. We applied the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) developed by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues to enable systematic assessments of institutions. To identify the determinants of the degree of implementation, national contexts, decision-making, and patterns of interaction were investigated for five case countries. The countries appeared to focus on international determinants, rather than on national political decision making. Therefore, encouraging countries to communicate changes in national institutional and economic arrangements required for effective climate change mitigation is imperative. Countries that consider the importance of structural changes and institutional strengthening, such as education and political and legislative instruments, are likely to implement the Paris Agreement to a high degree. A fair, inclusive procedure; the consequent legitimate burden; and the required criteria with synergy between mitigation and development provide the most effective mitigation. Applying the operationalised framework can benefit improvements in international climate agreements and local institutions.

Climate Policy Reform in Nepal through the Lenses of the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework

Successful climate change mitigation requires the commitment of rapidly developing low-income countries. Although most of them have strategies to tackle a fair share of the burden, implementation is low despite large amounts of international aid. We aimed to identify the dynamics underpinning their low implementation, using Nepal as a case study. Aid-dependent Nepal is vulnerable to climate change and committed to its mitigation while pursuing democracy and development. We applied an institutional analysis and development framework as well as an institutional grammar tool to analyze national climate policy. We found that the current national institutions did not enable effective climate change mitigation. Despite relevant political decisions being made, the arrangements were enacted slowly. Contrary to development issues, climate issues were not tackled across all of the relevant sectors, such as waste management, traffic, and agriculture, nor across governance levels, while there was little coherence between development and climate policies. Instead, community forestry was set in the main charge of climate actions, as explained by the history of development collaboration. Additionally, climate education was mainly addressed to local communities rather than to decision-makers. We conclude that building local institutions and funding addressed effectively, even to local actors, are key options to improve the implementation of the national climate strategies of Nepal and low-income countries.

Assessing the impact of sporting mega-events on the social and physical capital of communities in host cities: the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games experience

Over the past decade there has been increasing research on how sporting mega-events such as the Olympic and Commonwealth Games are developing strategies, norms and rules to govern how they impact the host nation, city and communities, and in particular their impacts on economic, social, physical, human and cultural capital. This paper addresses a gap within these interconnected fields by examining how the strategies, norms and rules used to govern a mega-event may impact the social and physical capitals of communities in the host city during and following a mega-event. These associations are revealed through a novel methodology that combines the Institutional Grammar Tool developed by Crawford and Ostrom and the Community Capitals Framework devised by Flora and Flora, to analyse policy documentation, complemented by 11 in-depth interviews on the refurbishment of the Broadbeach Lawn Bowls Club as a venue for the 2018 Commonwealth Games in the City of Gold Coast, Australia.

Policy composition and adoption duration: Capturing conflict in the legislative process

AbstractThe way in which public policies are composed may lead to conflicts that manifest in an extended policymaking duration. This paper explores the associations between policy composition and the relative duration for policies to be adopted in 15 U.S. state legislatures. We treat policy passage duration as an indicator of policy conflicts in the legislative process. We adapt the institutional grammar tool (IGT) to examine how 168 oil and gas development policies are composed and gauge the association between the content of these policies and the speed of their adoption. We find policies that are more stringent, contain more constitutive rules, target issues related to oil and gas operations or tax and finance take relatively longer to pass. These findings offer theoretical insights into the relationships between policy composition and policy adoption duration. They also provide methodological insights on measuring policy design components using a semi‐automated application of the IGT.

State Support for Families with Children during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Russia: Institutional Grammar Tool Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic is characterised by active law-making processes aimed at health care and support of different categories of population in many countries in the world. Starting from 2019, due to negative demographic trends, Russia has experienced the active transformation of the state support system for families having children. This trend has strengthened during the pandemic. Our research aims to analyse the internal characteristics of the family policy, namely the state support for families having children, during the year preceding pandemic and within the pandemic period. We consider the dynamics of the family policy architecture by means of Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) analysis and demonstrate the opportunities for using the results of such analyses in the highly dynamic situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analysed 11 federal legal acts adopted in Russia after January 1, 2020 that addressed parents and offered support for families with children. These acts contain 78 institutional statements that we coded in accordance with the IGT rules, defining the attributes, objects, deontics and conditions in each sentence. Our results are as follows: 1) Russian family policy before and during COVID-19 pandemic can be divided into three stages, including the short-term second stage from the beginning of 2020 to the beginning of the pandemic. The most obvious changes in the three stages are seen in terms of the Objects and Conditions of the institutional statements. At the second and third stages we see a major expansion of support receivers (the Objects) as well as changes in the Conditions for the benefits gain. Conditions vary greatly and differ in terms of regularity of measure and the type of the payment granted; 2) Legal acts adopted do not always indicate clear Attributes, i.e., the subjects (federal and regional authorities) responsible for the implementation of the particular rule sometimes can hinder the implementation of the regulation; 3) Classification of the parameters of the main support measures in the framework and categories of the IGT analyses lead us to the probable concept of the information policy that would be clear to the beneficiaries of support measures.

Introduction—Stories of the old world: The Narrative Policy Framework in the European context

Introduction—Stories of the old world: The Narrative Policy Framework in the European context

Measuring design diversity: A new application of Ostrom's rule types.

We draw on the Institutional Grammar Tool's rule types to empirically analyze the design of four major procedural regulatory instruments in the 27 member states of the European Union and the UK. They are: consultation, regulatory impact assessment, freedom of information, and the Ombudsman. By adopting the Institutional Grammar Tool as conceptual lens we end up with a single measurement template applicable to a variety of action situations. We derive measures that are conceptually robust and suitable for comparative analysis. With original data gathered on the official legal base in the 28 cases, we carry out principal components analysis. We identify design patterns across countries and instruments; the specialization of each instrument in terms of rule type; and the components that best explain cross‐country variation. In the conclusions we argue that to reframe the design features of the four instruments in conceptual, theoretical categories is not simply a taxonomical exercise but it extends to the territory of comparative policy analysis, practice and reform.

The Institutional Grammar Tool meets the Narrative Policy Framework: Narrating institutional statements in consultation.

We compare the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT). Given the focus of this special issue on the NPF, we first theorize how the IGT can contribute to the development of NPF categories, but also how the former gains conceptual leverage from the latter. We argue that it is useful to consider jointly NPF and IGT as this expands the benefit of NPF usage for policy researchers—uncovering not only the stories policy actors tell but also what these stories mean in terms of institutional statements. We provide a demonstration of how the conversation between these two policy lenses may develop by analyzing original data on the design of consultation procedures in the European Union, Finland, Ireland, and Malta.

Rules and the Ruled: Understanding Joint Patterns of Institutional Design and Behavior in Complex Governing Arrangements

Institutions are the rules of the game that guide policy behavior. Yet, the policy and administration literature on institutions and institutional design have been developed largely in parallel to policy behavior and network literatures. Drawing insights from both, we apply the Institutional Grammar Tool along with survey data to assess how addressing collective action problems result in variations in institutional designs and how rules influence behavior. Our case is the New York City Watersheds, where New York City, local governments, the State, and the Federal government agreed to secure access to high‐quality, unfiltered drinking water for New York City. Despite a long history of conflict, the parties devised a complex governing arrangement that created credible commitments while providing for a variety of public goods. Results show that rule configurations differ depending on whether they create credible commitments or provide public goods, and that credible commitment rules guide collaboration patterns among stakeholders.

Does consultation count for corruption? The causal relations in the EU-28

ABSTRACT Consultation is a policy instrument geared toward stakeholder engagement in the formulation of primary and secondary legislation. It ensures certain categories of actors can access draft proposals, examine the evidence produced by government or regulators, provide comments and receive feedback. Using an original dataset of consultation design across the EU-28, we examine how variations in combinations of consultation design matter for perceptions of corruption. Using Ostrom’s Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT), we develop expectations about the causal effects of combinations of formal consultation rules together with the condition of social capital, which captures important attributes of the context in which consultation operates. We test our expectations using set-theoretic techniques. Our findings indicate: formal consultation rules are rarely sufficient for mitigating perceptions of corruption, legally prescribed procedures are often replaced by informal rules, and the limited effect of formal consultation rules on perceptions of corruption is due to an incomplete design of the procedures.

Governing Urban Water Conflict through Watershed Councils—A Public Policy Analysis Approach and Critique

Cities face substantial water governance challenges, even more so when their activities are water-intensive, as global tourism is. As the lower-most level of government, municipalities face important challenges when dealing with water stress. Designing robust urban water policy thus may require us to challenge currently popular modes of governance by river basin councils, as predicated by the integrated water resources management (IWRM) paradigm. In this paper, I conduct a public policy analysis of a case study of intra-urban water conflict in the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende (SMA), an extremely popular tourist destination with substantive water scarcity challenges. I draw insights from an application of the Institutional Grammar Tool, IGT (as proposed by Ostrom and Crawford) on a series of textual datasets derived from ethnographic, qualitative longitudinal field research, document analysis, and elite interviews with stakeholders to explain the reasons underlying community concerns about urban water supply which have derived in conflict in San Miguel de Allende and increasingly manifested over the past few years (2017–2020). My analysis suggests that to tackle growing intra-urban antagonism derived from increasing water insecurity in San Miguel de Allende, a more localized, micro-watershed approach might be more fruitful than a traditional river basin council strategy.

The anatomy of institutions: diagnosing the formation of legal rules

ABSTRACTThe explanation for the outcomes of environmental policies is often sought either in policy design or in the behaviour of street-level bureaucrats, thus tending to examine only one level of the policy process and neglecting its multi-level nested nature. Specifically, most of the studies omit addressing policy specification, which is located between design and adoption of primary legislation and the actions of public service workers. Considering the policy process as a multi-level nested process of shaping and carrying out legal rules, this paper uses an institutional economics approach and the institutional grammar tool for its analysis. Using the example of the Ukrainian soil protection policy, it examines the way legal rules are being co-created and the policy objectives shaped at the policy specification stage and discusses the implications for the discretion of street-level bureaucrats, behaviour of the policy target group, and soil protection. The results of the study reveal that the desired outcomes of the Ukrainian soil protection policy are undermined because many institutional statements written in primary legislation are not supported by the expectation of remedy in case of non-compliance and are therefore dysfunctional.

A sleeping giant awakes? The rise of the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) in policy research

The Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) is an important and relatively recent innovation in policy theory and analysis. It is conceptualized to empirically operationalize the insights of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. In the last decade, political scientists have offered a number of applications of the IGT, mainly focused on disclosing and scrutinizing in-depth the textual configurations of policy documents. These efforts, involving micro-level analyses of syntax as well as more general classifications of institutional statements according to rule types, have underpinned empirical projects mainly in the area of environmental and common-pool resources. Applications of IGT are still in their infancy, yet the growing momentum is sufficient for us to review what has been learned so far. We take stock of this recent, fast-growing literature, analyzing a corpus of 26 empirical articles employing IGTs published between 2008 and 2017. We examine them in terms of their empirical domain, hypotheses, and methods of selection and analysis of institutional statements. We find that the existing empirical applications do not add much to explanation, unless they are supported by research questions and hypotheses grounded in theory. We offer three conclusions. First, to exploit the IGT researchers need to go beyond the descriptive, computational approach that has dominated the field until now. Second, IGT studies grounded in explicit hypotheses have more explanatory leverage, and therefore, should be encouraged when adopting the tool outside the Western world. Third, by focusing on rules, researchers can capture findings that are more explanatory and less microscopic.

Using institutional grammar to improve understanding of the form and function of payment for ecosystem services programs

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes are governed by complex institutional arrangements. Specific rules are needed to control who can participate in buying and selling of services, under what circumstances participation is allowed, how transactions are regulated, and many other actions. Decisions made by the developers of PES schemes about what rules to include and what form these rules take are likely to have an impact on the eventual success or failure of the scheme. This paper applies the Institutional Analysis and Develop Framework’s rules typology and Institutional Grammar Tool to develop a new method of classifying and summarizing institutional arrangements of PES schemes. We use 21 water quality trading schemes and develop the institutional rules classification and summary system. The classification system enables comparative assessment of institutional diversity across PES schemes. We demonstrate the utility of the classification system for this purpose by showing that there is significant institutional diversity among water quality trading schemes, despite their common environmental objectives and market-based approaches to addressing environmental challenges. We conclude with suggestions for applying the classification system to comparative research to understand the effectiveness of PES schemes generally and how differences in institutional arrangements may contribute to success or failure.

Problemas de agencia en la educación básica en México: un diagnóstico institucional

Dada la centralidad que la reforma educativa del Pacto por México pone a las reglas del juego ―vis a vis conducta docente―, este artículo examina el diseño institucional que le precede. Se problematizaron afirmaciones de que el diseño previo creaba problemas de agencia. El objetivo fue demostrar la configuración de un tipo específico de problema de agencia: el riesgo moral organizacional. Se de-construyó la normatividad con la Herramienta de la Gramática Institucional de Crawford y Ostrom (1995). El IGT permite identificar sistemáticamente las reglas presentes ―si las hubiere― en documentos de políticas, develando el código genético de las políticas que configuran arenas, lugar en que los individuos interactúan. Se encontró que la forma en que se estructura el control administrativo en los planteles en relación a la aplicación de sanciones a maestros constituye una situación de riesgo moral dado sus supuestos.

Factors influencing residents' acceptance (support) of remediation technologies

An increasing diversity of technologies are being used to remediate contaminated sites, yet there remains little understanding of the level of acceptance that residents living near these sites hold for these technologies, and what factors influence their level of acceptance. This lack of understanding hinders the remediation industry's ability to effectively engage with these residents about remediation technology selection, at a time when such engagement is become part and parcel of remediation policy and practice. The study develops on wider research into public acceptance of technologies, using data from a telephone survey of 2009 residents living near thirteen contaminated sites across Australia. Within the survey acceptance is measured through residents' level of support for the application of remediation technologies in their local area. Firstly, a regression analysis of closed-ended questions, and coding of open-ended questions are combined to identify the main predictors of residents' support for remediation technologies. Secondly, coding of open-ended questions was analysed using Crawford and Ostrom's Institutional Grammar Tool to identify norms and sanctions guiding residents' willingness to negotiate their support. The research identifies factors associated with the residents' personal and demographic characteristics, their physical context and engagement with institution during remediation processes, and the technologies themselves which predict residents' level of support for the application of remediation technologies. Bioremediation technologies had higher levels of support than chemical, thermal and physical technologies. Furthermore, the paper identifies a core set of norms and sanctions residents use to negotiate their level of support for remediation technologies.

Passing the buck? Analyzing the delegation of discretion after transposition of European Union law

AbstractThis article seeks to map and explain the extent to which national legislators constrain discretion contained in European Union directives during transposition. To this end, we use standard hypotheses from the domestic delegation literature regarding the necessity of policy conflict and transaction costs. Our empirical approach is based on a focused comparison of the transposition of several provisions of the Asylum Reception Conditions Directive in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In order to capture content‐specific aspects of discretion we employ an innovative measurement tool, the so‐called Institutional Grammar Tool. The study shows that while all three states formally comply with the directive, the level of European Union discretion delegated to practical implementers varies considerably across the cases. Standard delegation theory cannot fully explain the patterns. Instead, existing delegation theories have to be adjusted to the transposition context, by accounting for domestic preferences regarding the status quo.

Unveiling the Features of a Regulatory System: The Institutional Grammar of Tobacco Legislation in Mexico

The United Nations will host a drug policy summit in 2016. This will be a good forum to evaluate the effectiveness of existing legal frameworks. The institutional grammar tool can help with such evaluation. This article uses the tool to analyze the inherent features of tobacco regulations in Mexico. The analysis shows that the legal framework seeks to curb consumption with a combination of information and choice rules, and administrative penalties. As the analysis reveals, the usefulness of the method depends upon the availability of a solid theory that allows one to link rule features and the behavior they expect to induce.