Evolution of institutional diversity in a changing world: Finding solutions in resilient agricultural systems

Introduction

Institutional diversity is considered as important as biological diversity for our long-term survival. Broadly defined as the variety of rules, norms, and strategies that societies use to govern shared resources (e.g., grazing land, forests, irrigation waters), it could enhance our ability to sustainably manage them and to cope with new and unexpected disturbances such as climate change.

Knowledge Gap

Surprisingly, a global quantification of institutional diversity and a full understanding of the process by which institutions adapt to new conditions are lacking, partly due to the absence of tools for the quantification of institutional diversity. This knowledge gap prevents us from responding to key questions for global sustainability such as:

1. How much institutional diversity is there?
2. How is it globally distributed, and how is it evolving?
3. More importantly, is institutional diversity and the evolution of institutions increasing our capacity to sustainably manage natural resources in our rapidly changing world?

Project Focus

With a focus on small-scale agricultural systems across the world, RESILIENT RULES will apply a novel approach by adapting tools used in life sciences for the study of biological diversity to quantify institutional diversity and respond to the following aims:

1. To study global patterns of institutional diversity and the large-scale association between the diversity of agricultural institutions and key environmental and social drivers.
2. To analyse the evolution of agricultural institutions.
3. To assess the contribution of institutional diversity to long-term resilience to global changes.

Societal Importance

This innovative interdisciplinary study of the spatial and temporal patterns of global institutional diversity is of major societal importance, since it will help understand the role of diversity for resilient governance of resources, create new data on agricultural institutions around the world, and open up new research opportunities in quantitative institutional diversity.