Berge, Erling. 2000. "Principles of Institutional Design and the Management of Norwegian Nature." Presented at "Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millenium", the Eighth Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, May 31-June 4.

Abstract

"The paper reviews some of the legislation relevant for the management of Norwegian nature to see if design principles suggested by Goodin can be recognized. Goodin's suggestions for the design of a 'good' institution are:

--revisability - institutions ought to be revised as experiences with their working accumulate;

--robustness - institutions should be able to adapt easily to 'appropriate' social change while resisting 'inappropriate;'

--sensitivity - institutions should respond to motivational complexity among the relevant actors;

--publicity - all institutional 'actions' should in principle be publicly known without thereby frustrating their purpose;

--variation - the institutions ought to allow or even encourage variation/adaptation to local conditions.

"The findings are that Norwegian legislation is fairly easily revisable and it has a lot of variation. The publicity principle has a weak legal standing. Robustness is difficult to gauge, but the intertwining of different acts and the long complex process of any major change of the law may represent some safeguards. The sensitivity of an institution is not only a function of the formal rules but also of their application. More centralised decision-making will tend to make the sensitivity to local actors and local conditions more difficult. There seems to be a systematic difference in centralisation of decision-making between the urban industrial concerns with nature and the rural- agricultural concerns."