CoCon builds on more than two decades of research on the historical development, institutional design and long-term dynamics of Institutions for Collective Action (ICAs), but asks a fundamentally new question: whether societies accumulate and transmit institutional capacities for self-governed cooperation across generations and organisational forms, or whether similar institutional arrangements are repeatedly reinvented. Earlier projects and publications provide distinct components needed to test this Cooperative Continuum: source-rich longitudinal evidence, comparative knowledge of ICA archetypes, rule-coding methods, computational and generative modelling, contemporary access, and FAIR data infrastructure.
CoCon integrates these foundations in a new inferential architecture – the CoCon Observatory and Longitudinal Institutional Grammar (L-IG) – to reconstruct rule trajectories, candidate and supported genealogies, and institutional repertoires, and to distinguish inheritance from functional convergence, mixed origins and cases where evidence remains insufficient. The relationship to earlier work is therefore cumulative but non-duplicative: CoCon shifts the explanatory object from organisations and their resilience to the transmission, transformation, recombination and independent re-emergence of governance knowledge across organisational rupture, archetypes and historical periods.