1.1. Challenges to institutional scholarship

In their article reviewing scholarly trends in studying common property resources (CPR), Van Laerhoven and Ostrom wrote ‘Regarding the future, we think that scholars must embrace the challenge of finding ways to deal more explicitly with complexity, uncertainty and institutional dynamics’ (Van Laerhoven and Ostrom 2007, 5). They elaborated on the need for developing a keener eye for complexity at scale, for examining multi-use and multi commons and for the household use of private and public resources. This special issue furthers critical approaches to the study of institutions that address such challenges and explain both continuity and change in evolving institutions.

All analytical approaches face similar challenges in explaining the emergence, form and functioning of institutions. There is a need to place local institutional arrangements within the wider frames of governance (the political ecology and political economy) which shape the possibilities for resource allocation, adaptation and negotiated solutions. Institutional analysts must explain how institutions are animated by people, acting individually or collectively in particular spaces, in relation to others, and to the physical and material environment. Further, there is the challenge of showing how power works to sustain institutions and to shape participation, access and outcomes. In addressing such issues, institutionalists deal with complexity, uncertainty and institutional dynamics in relation to a multiplicity of factors. These include the interaction between ecological and social systems; the diversity of livelihoods, resources and uses; the variability of actors and their practices within heterogeneous communities; multiple and overlapping scales, domains and timescales of interaction; the often opaque ways in which institutions work and power operates; and the variability of outcomes produced. Faced with such multiple complexities, analysts need to combine the generation of rich, context specific accounts of institutional functioning with the identification of recurring patterns of governance and societal resource allocation.

Papers in this special issue address these and related challenges through a critical institutional lens, often deploying the concept of bricolage to further the study of institutional dynamics. Most of the papers included here are concerned with development, policy or project interventions to manage common pool resources or public goods and services. Saunders (2014) suggests that commons scholarship may well have inadvertently contributed to the unfulfilled expectations of many such interventions partly because concepts such as participation, social capital, social learning and empowerment have proved difficult to craft into workable arrangements. Further, CPR theory often struggles to effectively conceptualise socially embedded resource users and so to fully understand norms, values and interests; in focusing on efficiency and functionality CPR theory may overlook the ways in which local dynamics are shaped by interactions at multiple scales (see also Blaikie 2006). Similarly, mainstream commons scholarship has been critiqued for dealing inadequately with heterogeneity within communities, for skating over the politics of policies, discourses and local power dynamics, and for lack of meaningful conceptualisation of the social relations and meanings associated with natural resource management (Hall et al. 2014). In the sections that follow we outline critical institutional approaches and to suggest how they begin to address such deficiencies.

2.1. Institutional bricolage

The concept of institutional bricolage (De Koning 2011, 2014; Cleaver 2012) has good explanatory power in showing how norms are articulated, explaining both institutional endurance and change, enriching understanding of human agency and relations of authority and in questioning assumptions about institutional effectiveness. Adapted from Levi-Strauss’ formulation of intellectual bricolage, this concept has also been developed by academics in the context of livelihood studies (Batterbury 2001) organizational studies (Freeman 2007), religious anthropology (Galvan 1997) and more. This article and the special issue mostly build on the work by Douglas (1987) on institutional bricolage.

Institutional bricolage is a process through which people, consciously and non-consciously, assemble or reshape institutional arrangements, drawing on whatever materials and resources are available, regardless of their original purpose. In this process, old arrangements are modified and new ones invented. Institutional components from different origins are continuously reused, reworked, or refashioned to perform new functions. Adapted configurations of rules, practices, norms and relationships are attributed meaning and authority. These refurbished arrangements are the necessary responses to everyday challenges, and are embedded in daily practice. Bricolage is a fundamentally dynamic process characterised by variable levels of institutional visibility and functioning. Let us briefly elaborate and illustrate these points.

In the reworking of the existing institutional arrangements, actors innovate, but they do so within the limits of their resources, social circumstances and what is perceived as legitimate. As De Koning (2011), adapting Levi-Strauss, suggests; the bricoleur might make a lampshade out of an umbrella stand but the same umbrella stand cannot be made into a space shuttle. The layering of these arrangements over time, changes in policy environments and in political and social discourses also ensure that the mechanisms that form institutions can be pieced together from a variety of sources (Sehring 2009; Marin and Bjorkland 2015). Institutions so formed are therefore a patchwork of the new and second hand and they include: habitual ways of doing things; well-worn practices adapted to new conditions; organisational arrangements invented or borrowed from elsewhere.

Such pieced together institutions often have multipurpose functions. They are rarely organised only according to single purposes, sectoral divisions or particular projects. Even if they begin that way, they often evolve to encompass other purposes and layers of meaning (Verzijl and Dominguez 2015). An example is the women’s savings group that also collects the water tariff (Cleaver 2002), or a community forest management association that functions as a social security mechanism in case of illness (De Koning 2011). Pieced together or adapted, multifunctional arrangements must be made to seem familiar, to fit with accepted logics of practice and social relationships. It is this perceived fit that gives adapted institutions their legitimacy and so facilitates the exercise of authority through them. Institutions are ‘naturalised’ (Douglas 1987) through a number of processes ranging from calls on tradition (which may be invented or re-invented); on symbols, discourses and power relationships borrowed from other settings; and by analogy to accepted ways of doing things, to the social order and to ideas of rightness in relation to social, natural or spiritual worlds (Douglas 1987).

Elaborating on the processes of naturalizing institutions, De Koning (2011, 2014) categorises these and identifies three processes which happen when formalised institutions are introduced into local settings: aggregation, alteration and articulation. Aggregation relates to the re-creative re-combination of the introduced institutions with different types of institutional and socio-cultural elements. This process entails mixing the old with the new in order to create a more practical, useful institutional framework. Alteration refers to the tweaking of and tinkering with institutions to make them fit better with livelihood priorities or claims to identity. Articulation involves the asserting of traditional identities and culture in resistance to newly introduced institutional arrangements (De Koning 2011).

Bearing the features of critical institutional approaches and bricolage in mind we will now discuss some key themes, indicating the insights they offer and the questions they raise for the study of the commons.

3.1. Can bricolage be facilitated? Can it be transformatory?

The blending, layering and piecing together involved in bricolage can generate ‘thickness’ in institutions, and helps to explain their endurance through adaptation over time. However path dependence, power relations and national and global governance frameworks can also constrain attempts to innovate and negotiate. Questions arise here about the extent to which institutional complexity offers greater opportunities for actors to negotiate and innovate, to choose how to piece together their livelihoods. Some (Funder and Marani 2015; Ingram et al. 2015) see bricolage as a strategy for dealing with fragmented or weak governance arrangements. Such governance voids provide space for bricoleurs to improvise and to create arrangements tailored to fit local circumstances; but the effects of these on different actors may vary. Indeed, multiple social networks can dilute rather than strengthen institutions, shifting and dividing people’s attention and ensuring only their only partial enrolment with any particular governance arrangement (Meagher 2005). Others see bricolage as the necessary rite of passage for any contemporary institution to become embedded in everyday life (De Koning and Benneker 2013).

Taking examples of different scholars working in the Usangu plains in Tanzania we find various perspectives on the possibilities offered by institutional pluralism. Els Lecoutere (2011), writing of irrigation management initially found less conflict than she expected in a multi-livelihood situation and claims that institutional pluralism can increase the potential for creativity and for pragmatic conflict resolution for some actors. Odgaard’s (2002) study long term study of customary and state arrangements for land and water management in the same region, suggests rather that these work in tandem to ensure the double disadvantaging of already marginalised people (pastoralists, poor women, fisherfolk). Research by Cleaver and colleagues (2013) shows that politically marginalized pastoralists can indeed choose to selectively engage with institutions which align with their interests and to dynamically adapt others through bricolage. However this is insufficient to overcome the ways that state policies and economic trends work against them to restrict their pastoralist livelihoods.

So institutional plurality poses a challenge for critical scholars and for those practitioners concerned with facilitating bricolage to secure social, economic and environmental change (Nunan 2006; Merrey and Cook 2012). There is a growing concern in development related literature with identifying ‘arrangements that work’ – conceptualised as the practical hybrid mechanisms that people create to get a job done and ensure meaning and social fit (Booth 2012; De Herdt 2013; Jones 2015). In common with many ‘wicked problems’, resource management issues and the fairness of institutional arrangements depends on the viewpoint of the person perceiving them (Venot 2011). It is highly unlikely that a single institutional solution will represent all users and livelihood interests. However practical and policy approaches often require simplification and standardisation of institutional form. Morris et al. (2013) describe how one NGO programme promoting community based natural resource management in Tanzania, moved away from supporting designed institutions (water user associations) towards a process of promoting facilitated stakeholder learning forums, bringing together actors who would be unlikely to interact in planned institutional structures.

4.1. Agency, rationalities and meaning

The logics of practices matter in understanding how people operate in relation to institutions (De Koning and Benneker 2013). Things (relationships, resources, material goods, social order) matter to people beyond their mere instrumental functionality (Sayer 2011). Such meanings often have emotional, symbolic or moral dimensions as well as more pragmatic or strategic ones. In securing access to resources and services, people are also concerned with wider ends (related to order and meaning, identity and citizenship, wellbeing). This means that practical arrangements for managing resources are imbued with wider social significance and can be traced back to the generative principles of the social field (Bourdieu 1977). An example comes from an ecotourism project in Papua New Guinea accepted by a local community to render an additional income, but also used as a tool to re-establish traditional power relations among and between communities and to secure access to alluvial gold mining (De Koning and Benneker 2013).

In critical institutional approaches the model of the individual is highly relational. Action is only partly the result of conscious strategy and is shaped by the extent to which a person perceives themselves as autonomous, or inextricably entwined in a group (Burkitt 2012). Emotions matter when assessing life choices – they may shape actions of compliance in order to avoid the distress of conflict, or feelings of anger and indignation may lead to resistance (Page 2005). An Ecuadorian indigenous community opposed state interference as its historical relation with the state was characterised by feelings of distrust. Consequently, forest legislation was met with strong resistance (De Koning 2011).

Understanding people’s actions and the ways these affect institutions goes further than merely tracking practices and social relationships – there is a need to uncover meanings, world views, forms of legitimisation and authority – all aspects which may or may not be visible in public decision making contexts. Rationality is shaped by belief as well as calculations and both shape social behaviour, political expectations and understanding of the social order. Crucially though, worldviews are not necessarily hegemonic and unchanging – they are perceived, interpreted and drawn on variably by people. Worldviews drawing on traditional understandings may permeate arrangements dominated by contemporary globalised economic factors as shown by Boelens (2009). In his studies of water control in the Andes elements of Andean cosmological beliefs persist even in the most marketised communities, emerging more strongly in times of crisis. Such myths and cosmologies can be used to legitimise the actions of particular interest groups and they are built into everyday behaviour, social relationships and institutions.

Worldviews or cosmologies provide a way of ordering the social and natural world, of accommodating unpredictability and of defining proper responses. For example, the traditional institutional unit for Sami reindeer herders in Norway, the Siida, incorporates such eco – cosmological perspectives (Sara 2009). These offer some orderliness in relation to the unpredictabilities of the weather and environment and shape local discussions and decisions within these units. Of course this knowledge may not completely align with professional or state representations of rights and resource management as embodied in legislation, regulation and bureaucratic institutions. Such moral-ecological understandings are also the source of symbols and motifs which may be used to legitimise certain actions, and naturalise institutional and power relationships (Lund 2006).

4.2. Differential capacities, variable practices: power and governance

Agency is linked to power through the capacity to deploy material (allocative) and non-material (authoritative) resources (Giddens 1984). Such power is exercised in rule formation in public spaces of decision making but also in the power to control the agenda (what is discussed, who is represented) and the more invisible power to shape meaning and ideas about what is acceptable, which occurs in multiple social spaces (Lukes 2005). CI scholars are often concerned with the ways in which actors exercise or experience power beyond the public institutions of decision-making (Funder and Marani 2015). Additional concerns include the multiple ways in which power is distributed within local organizations; the lack of power in local institutions; the ways in which new institutions and rules may be captured by old elites, or new actors (Ribot 2009; Hall et al. 2014).

Poor and marginalized people often find it difficult to shape the formal rules and the rules in use, to negotiate norms, and experience the costs and benefits of institutional functioning differently to more powerful people. The costs of participation may be high and their room for manoeuvre restricted but poor people are often more dependent on fewer institutions for their resource access and livelihoods (Agrawal 2005). Cleaver’s study of village water supply in Zimbabwe shows women related to the dominant village family able to negotiate flexibility in the rules for using the waterpoint whereas a poor woman resident quickly pays water fees she can’t afford in order to maintain access and social reputation (Cleaver 2012).

The variability in the ways that people with different social identities and resources exercise agency in overlapping institutional spaces requires disentangling. In Ingram et al’s study of the governance of non-timber forest products more powerful actors seek to amend statutory arrangements and create alliances with NGO’s while those with little voice pursue access to land and water less formally (Ingram et al. 2015). For Verzijl and Dominguez (2015) multiple identities and overlapping institutional membership may allow actors to manipulate institutional spaces. Negotiations and struggles occur over natural resources as material access and rights, but also over meanings and discourses, representation and participation, as well as individual identities. In a study of the gendered negotiation of access to land and water in Peru, Delgado and Zwarteveen (2007) detail differing approaches by women to exercising agency and accessing resources. Some women work within the boundaries of ‘traditional’ gendered social water organisation and some challenge these and assert their rights to participate in more ‘masculine’ domains of official irrigation institutions at some cost to their own reputation. Delgado and Zwarteveen suggests that the variable ability to exercise agency through institutions and to challenge boundaries is highly dependent on the possession of resources (land, knowledge, family networks).

Significant attention has been paid in recent policy and academic literature to the ways in which actors make ‘practical norms’ of governance. These are the implicit rules, embedded in practice, which may divert or subvert official or explicit social rules. Some practical norms are formed strategically and through reflection, some enacted through a tacit ‘feel for the game’. Recent analyses illustrate the dynamics between power and pragmatism, in the ways that bureaucrats work through processes of bricolage. Funder and Marani (2015) document how newly created district level Environment Officers in Kenya pragmatically piece together strategies for exercising their role which include cultivating personal networks and piggy backing on established authority, tailoring informal agreements and delegating public authority to civil society. Significantly, they need to claim or create legitimacy for such blended arrangements.

4.3. Physical embodiment, infrastructure and technology

The strong focus in institutional theory and commons scholarship on rule formation and negotiation necessarily privileges voice as a way of exercising agency. A critical institutional approach however, might also focus on the ways in which agency is enacted through physical bodies, and in relation to material structures and physical phenomena (Arts et al. 2013). Status and power may be associated with particular forms of dress, demeanour and behaviour, all very evident in public spaces and the bodily enactment of resource access has symbolic and political significance (Page 2005). The ability to be negotiating in institutional spaces and to directly affect the rules- in- use of resource access also depends on physical presence. It could be argued that able bodiedness is key to the exercise of agency in participatory natural resource management with poor people in the Usangu plains in Tanzania often suffering multiple physical constraints on their ability to produce livelihoods, to travel and to engage socially and institutionally (Cleaver 2012).

Embodied agency is also exercised in relation to natural resources and technology. Different forms of technology (such as traditional earth banks or modern concrete gates in irrigation systems) imply different degrees of control, by different actors. The unlined field irrigation canals can be easily diverted by any farmer through the insertion of mud barriers, while ‘improved’ concrete lined structures require a gate, probably operated by a gatekeeper acting in some official capacity. Kooij et al. (2015) argue that such infrastructural mechanisms may be a practical way of dealing with complexities by replacing discussion in public forum. In this sense infrastructure, rather than institutional arrangements shapes people’s actual practices and the exercise of agency.