Unlocking conflicts and traps: Institutional diagnosis for transformative social-ecological governance in a non-ergodic world

Abstract

Institutions and their dynamics are critical for governance towards sustainability in social-ecological systems (SES). The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework is among the most used for understanding the role of institutions. Here, I propose a metatheoretic device to contribute to enhance the IAD’s capacity for SES diagnostics and transformative governance, addressing several gaps identified in the literature. These gaps are related to the lack of systematization in IAD-based analysis of historical and power dynamics, and outcome emergence in SES. Device development is based on the synthesis of insights from a two decades-long case study in the Doñana region aimed at understanding historical development of current governance, and its relationship with water conflicts and traps. The main aim of the metatheoretic device is to offer a tool able to prompt reflection on the part of analysts, on critical interrelated assumptions and logics related to ergodicity and contingency. These notions, I argue, may fundamentally affect the model of the rational actor and the approach to power in institutional analysis, as well as the interpretation of historical empirical results, synthesis and theory building. Metatheoretic building was based on primal concepts defining the IAD framework, its politicized version, and its core advancement into the Networks of Adjacent Action Situations approach, used in Doñana to explore connections between the case’s micro-meso levels and the macro level integrating path dependence. My hope is that the device is able to trigger deeper learning about the dynamics underlying institutional and behavioral variation, and how these affect emergent processes.