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

Abstract

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.

The institutional grammar in policy process research

“…Most applications of the IG in policy studies to date have focused on describing syntactic information through the use of qualitative analysis, counting statistics, or network analysis methods, but some also use syntactic information alongside, or as inputs to, other methods toward assessment of policy dynamics of interest. For example, Schlager et al (2021) use an IG and rule type coding of policy documents as a basis for a statistical analysis that supports the investigation of whether policies that govern different types of public dilemmas exhibit different design features. Olivier (2019) uses syntactic information to construct social networks to assess how policies prescribe interactions among policy actors.…”

“…Examples of questions motivating IG research in these policy domains are: How are institutional (in this case, policy) statements configured in policy design (Carter et al, 2015)? What are the theoretical and practical implications of statement configurations observed in policy design (Schlager et al, 2021)? How is decision‐making and/or behavioral discretion afforded or restricted through policy design (Dorrenbacher & Mastenbroek, 2019)?…”

“…What policy design factors facilitate and/or hinder policy implementation (Carter et al, 2015)? In exploring these and similar questions through applications of the IG, scholars rely on a wide array of theories and frameworks, some of which are affiliated with the IAD framework, and some of which are not, such as the common‐pool resource theory (Ghorbani & Bravo, 2016), Sabatier and Mazmanian's (1980) policy implementation framework (Carter et al, 2015), local public contracting theory (Schlager et al, 2021), and the social‐ecological systems framework (Lien, 2020). Altogether, extant IG research clearly conveys that the IG can be used to analyze policies governing a wide variety of domains (i.e., it is not overfitted for one particular policy area), that it can be used to investigate a wide array of research questions, and that is agnostic to theory or framework.…”

“…Public policy scholars engaged in the study of institutions have focused their attention on institutions embodied in the form of public policies; for example, laws, regulations, interstate compacts, and city charters (e.g., Basurto et al, 2010; Carter et al, 2015; Feiock et al, 2016; Heikkila et al, 2011). They have sought to understand the design (i.e., content) of such institutions, and have been particularly interested in assessing how institutions structure individual and collective action among actors, how they are interpreted and applied, and to what extent policies are complied with (e.g., Schlager et al, 2021; Siddiki, 2014). In effect, the topics pursued by policy scholars studying policies as kinds of institutions, are similar to those explored by scholars of the public policy process more generally—insofar as policy process scholars are broadly interested in policy formulation, design, implementation, and compliance (Linder & Peters, 1984; May & Winter, 2009; Schneider & Ingram, 1997).…”

The Promise of Collective Action for Large-Scale Commons Dilemmas: Reflections on Common-Pool-Resource Theory

“…This marks a shift in focus from applying diagnostic tools to building theoretical understanding. In this sense, our argument is similar to others that have been made already (Steins & Edwards 1999;Johnson 2004;Cleaver 2012), and in practice there are many ongoing theory-building efforts in the commons literature (c.f., Clement 2010; Poteete et al 2010;Fleischmann et al 2014;Andersson et al 2014;Baggio et al 2016;Orazgaliyev & Araral 2019;Niemiec et al 2020;Olivier & Schlager 2021), including many studies using the SES framework (c.f., Epstein et al 2014;Cox 2014;Hammond Wagner et al 2020;Wang et al 2020) and others building on critical institutionalism (Cleaver & de Koning 2015).…”