Understanding the issues surrounding groundwater governance is a precondition for developing policy recommendations for both national and transboundary groundwater governance. This review discusses groundwater attributes relevant to the design of governance systems and provides a systematic review of current national groundwater governance differentiated by various policy instruments. The synthesis of both resource system characteristics and experience with policy instruments allows us to conceptualize institutional aspects of groundwater governance. This leads to six institutional aspects: (1) voluntary compliance; (2) tradition and mental models; (3) administrative responsibility and bureaucratic inertia; (4) conflict resolution mechanisms; (5) political economy; and (6) information deficits. Each of these issues embodies institutional challenges for national and international policy implementation.

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The grammar of institutions developed by Crawford and Ostrom presents a common syntax for analysing institutions and dismantles them into their components. This is a promising undertaking given the huge diversity of definitions of institutions, even within a single discipline. Additionally, the grammar opens a long existing black box regarding why individuals do or do not follow an institution. It differentiates between formal sanctions ('or elses' in the language of the grammar) which are already well analysed and more moral and emotion based factors (so called delta parameters). This process of differentiation is currently widely observed, particularly in economics. Recognising that it is a necessary step forward in analysing institutions, this paper analyses and develops the grammar: first, in relation to its syntactical clearness; and second, in relation to its particular emphasis on delta parameters as central elements for understanding the efficiency and effectiveness of institutions.