On October 22, dr. Amineh Ghorbani, presented as part of our SEICA Open Seminar Talks. Amineh Ghorbani is an Associate professor of Institutional Modelling and Analysis at the System’s Engineering group. She is also an affiliated researcher of our research group, of the Institutional Grammar Research Initiative, and the Ostrom Workshop.

Dr. Ghorbani’s research focuses on the role of institutions in climate change mitigation and adaptation. She uses modelling, simulation and network analysis in combination with qualitative methods to conduct her research. During this SEICA Open Seminar Talk, she gave a presentation based on the thesis by one of her students (Kaninik Baradi), titled: ‘Procedural justice in climate adaptation: do written policies make a difference?’ Procedural justice delves into the fairness of decision-making processes and the distribution of power within these processes. Policy documents are a valuable source for studying (gaps in) procedural justice.

The author choose the case of Chennai in India on which the World Bank also did an assessment. The method consisted of the following steps: 1) identifying dimensions of procedural justice, then 2) dissecting policy documents using the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IADF), the institutional grammar and institutional networks, and 3) using Large Language Models (LLMs), and ultimately 4) analyzing the institutions within these policy documents to identify justice issues.

Comparing the results to the assessment by the World Bank showed that the bank fails to identify a few cores institutional gaps. This study has, amongst others, demonstrated that institutional analysis can benefit from using LLMs for coding, and from using network analysis to study rules and regulations in relation to each other.