This section provides an overview of the projects that are most relevant to the CoCon project. For each project, you will find a brief summary of its main aims, contributions, and outputs, together with an explanation of how it relates to CoCon. The overview includes both current and completed projects, highlighting their connections to CoCon’s research questions, methodological foundations, data infrastructure, and participatory approach.
Current projects
UNICA develops a unified theory of the development and resilience of Institutions for Collective Action across Europe over the past millennium, focusing on historical ICA archetypes, scaling strategies, and how the size and heterogeneity of members and resources shape institutional design and resilience. UNICA therefore takes the ICA-archetype as its principal explanatory object and asks why particular organisational forms develop and remain resilient. CoCon starts from a different unit of analysis and a different scientific question: it follows individual institutional rules and repertoires across organisations and time to determine whether governance knowledge is transmitted, recombined or independently reinvented, incl. across organisational rupture and between ICA-archetypes. CoCon thus shifts the explanatory object from the development and resilience of organisations to the long-term transmission and transformation of institutional knowledge. UNICA provides important comparative knowledge of ICA-archetypes and institutional variation, but CoCon neither extends UNICA’s unified theory nor duplicates its intended theoretical outcome; it addresses a distinct question that UNICA’s organisational-level design cannot answer.
CollectieveKracht is (since 2022) an established national stakeholder-dialogue and knowledge-exchange platform connecting citizen collectives with researchers, policymakers, financiers and other actors supporting citizen collectives. It facilitates sustained exchange between research and practice, enabling citizen collectives to share experiences, institutional knowledge and governance challenges, while researchers and other stakeholders contribute evidence and expertise. In doing so, the platform identifies shared knowledge needs, promotes learning across sectors and organisational forms, and strengthens the capacity of contemporary collectives to contribute to societal transitions. For CoCon, CollectieveKracht provides the principal interface with contemporary citizen collectives and the present-day endpoint of the Cooperative Continuum. Its network will support dialogue with collectives across multiple domains, help identify and contextualise contemporary governance practices and organisational histories, and facilitate participatory archiving of successive versions of rules, statutes and other governance documents that are often dispersed across ephemeral digital environments. CollectieveKracht will also provide a structured setting for exchanging CoCon’s historical findings with practitioners and confronting emerging interpretations with contemporary experience. It thereby supports CoCon through stakeholder dialogue, knowledge exchange, participatory archiving and societal reflection, while continuing to serve its broader community and mission independently of the project
ECCO investigates the internal democratic governance of contemporary citizen collectives, focusing on how participation, representation, decision-making and democratic practices are organised and experienced within these organisations.Its relationship to CoCon is specific but limited: ECCO provides substantive contemporary substantive knowledge on internal democracy and collective decision-making, a governance domain that CoCon examines longitudinally in one of its domain studies. CoCon, however, asks a fundamentally different question: whether and how institutional rules governing collective decision-making are transmitted, transformed, recombined or independently reinvented across organisations and historical periods. ECCO does not reconstruct rule genealogies or study long-term institutional transmission. It therefore provides contemporary domain knowledge and a point of comparison, rather than data, methodology or an analytical framework on which CoCon depends.
CROWN develops a FAIR and Open Science infrastructure for research on citizen collectives, extending CollectieveKracht by integrating existing and newly generated datasets in a secure collaborative environment. It enables researchers and citizen collectives to co-create, access and reuse data while preserving data sovereignty, and provides a scalable infrastructure for Extreme Citizen Science. For CoCon, CROWN provides the technical and data-governance foundation for extending the historical record into the present. Through CROWN, contemporary citizen collectives can contribute successive versions of regulations, statutes and other governance records through participatory archiving, while provenance, metadata and access conditions are preserved systematically. CoCon uses CROWN as the interoperable participatory-archiving environment that enables contemporary institutional evidence to be collected and connected to the longitudinal historical corpus. This allows CoCon to bridge archival and living institutional evidence without making contemporary collectives passive objects of data collection and the infrastructure for the data repository that will be part of the CoCon Observatory
SCENTISS examines the present-day conditions that enable collective organisations to develop and generate societal impact, focusing on the organisational, institutional and contextual factors that shape their functioning and effectiveness. Its relationship to CoCon is limited and there is no substantive overlap in research questions or intended outcomes. SCENTISS is concerned with explaining the contemporary development and impact of collective organisations, whereas CoCon investigates the long-term transmission, transformation, recombination and independent emergence of institutional rules and governance knowledge across organisations, archetypes and historical periods. SCENTISS may provide contemporary contextual knowledge about the conditions under which collective organisations operate, but CoCon does not depend on its data, methods or explanatory framework. The projects therefore address distinct analytical levels and temporal questions.
RECAP investigates how citizen collectives can contribute to rural revitalisation as a form of social innovation, examining their contemporary role, functioning and potential contribution to rural communities. Its relationship to CoCon is limited and there is no substantive overlap in research questions, methodology or intended outcomes. RECAP focuses on contemporary citizen collectives and their role in rural social innovation. RECAP may provide broader contextual experience with contemporary citizen collectives and participatory research, but CoCon neither depends on RECAP’s data or methods nor extends its research agenda. The two projects therefore address distinct scientific problems at different analytical and temporal scales.
DAZO investigates how neighbourhood enterprises can translate multiple forms of societal value into structural cost-avoidance financing, focusing on the development of viable financing arrangements for contemporary citizen-led initiatives. Its relationship to CoCon is limited and there is no substantive overlap in research questions, methodology, data or intended outcomes. DAZO is an applied, contemporary project concerned with societal value creation and financing models. Dazo and CoCon share a broad interest in citizen collectives, but operate at different analytical levels and address fundamentally different scientific problems. CoCon does not depend on, extend or reproduce DAZO’s research activities or outputs.
Finished projects
Common Rules – The Regulation of Institutions for Managing Commons in Europe 1100–1800
Summary: Developed the internationally unique Common Rules Database by systematically coding historical governance rules using Institutional Grammar, creating one of the first machine-readable comparative datasets on commons.
Relevance to CoCon: Common Rules is a direct methodological precursor to L-IG. It demonstrated how historical governance provisions can be transformed into systematically coded institutional statements and compared across cases. CoCon extends this static semantic and substantive rule coding longitudinally: rules are linked across successive regulations, organisations and periods to reconstruct persistence, modification, disappearance, branching, merging, recombination and candidate genealogies. Common Rules supplies part of the analytical language; CoCon adds the longitudinal and inferential architecture required to test institutional inheritance against convergence.
Data Infrastructure for the Study of Guilds and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Pre-Industrial Times
Summary: Established one of Europe’s first large-scale digital research infrastructures for historical institutions for collective action, creating interoperable datasets on guilds and related organisations.
Relevance to CoCon: This project provides source-rich, interoperable historical data and long-standing expertise in comparative digital infrastructure for corporate collective action. In CoCon these assets contribute to the evidence base and provenance architecture of the Observatory, especially for cross-archetype comparison. CoCon goes beyond database construction by linking institutional statements longitudinally and using them to test competing explanations of continuity, transmission, transformation and convergence.
Sustainable Cooperation (SCOOP)
Summary: Contributed to an interdisciplinary national research programme investigating the conditions under which cooperation can emerge and persist across diverse social, economic, and environmental settings.
Relevance to CoCon: SCOOP contributes broad interdisciplinary expertise on the conditions under which cooperation emerges and persists. CoCon is more narrowly institutional and longitudinal: it studies formal governance rules as traces of accumulated cooperative capacity and tests whether similarities across ICAs arise through historical transmission or independent convergence. SCOOP therefore supplies complementary theoretical and interdisciplinary context rather than CoCon’s data or core inferential framework.
Knowledge Brokering to Build the Memory of Dutch Citizen Collectives as Part of the CollectieveKracht Platform
Summary: This project developed innovative approaches for capturing, preserving, and mobilising the knowledge generated by Dutch citizen collectives. By strengthening institutional memory and facilitating knowledge exchange between citizen initiatives, researchers, and policymakers, it explored how experiential knowledge can be transformed into a lasting public resource that supports learning and innovation across the sector.
Relevance to CoCon: This project provides direct experience with participatory knowledge preservation among contemporary citizen collectives. Its relevance lies in CoCon’s participatory-archiving strategy: identifying, contextualising and preserving successive governance documents so that institutional trajectories do not terminate artificially at the historical-contemporary divide. CoCon then analyses these materials within the Observatory and L-IG; the knowledge-brokering project itself does not reconstruct genealogies or test transmission.
Nature or Nurture? A Search for the Institutional and Biological Determinants of Life Expectancy in Europe During the Early Modern Period
Summary: This interdisciplinary VIDI project combined historical demography, economic history, institutional analysis, and life sciences to investigate how institutional and biological factors jointly shaped variations in health and life expectancy across early modern Europe. The project introduced innovative methods for integrating large-scale historical datasets from multiple disciplines to study long-term societal development.
Relevance to CoCon: The substantive topic is distinct, but the project demonstrates the PI’s capacity to integrate heterogeneous historical evidence, long time spans and multiple analytical traditions while maintaining source-critical comparison. This experience is relevant to CoCon’s construction of a provenance-rich millennium-long corpus and to its treatment of context as a competing explanation. There is no substantive overlap in research question or intended theoretical outcome.
United We Stand – The Dynamics and Consequences of Institutions for Collective Action in Pre-Industrial Europe
Summary: This pioneering ERC Starting Grant established one of the first large-scale European research programmes dedicated to the comparative study of institutions for collective action. Combining historical analysis, institutional theory, and the development of innovative digital datasets, the project investigated how commons, guilds, and other forms of self-governance emerged, functioned, adapted, and contributed to long-term economic and social development across Europe.
Relevance to CoCon: United We Stand established a major comparative historical foundation for the PI’s research on ICAs, generating source knowledge, datasets and experience with cross-European institutional comparison. CoCon uses that accumulated historical capacity for a different inferential purpose: reconstructing rule trajectories and genealogies across organisational forms and periods and testing whether recurring institutional arrangements reflect inheritance, convergence or mixed origins. The earlier project therefore reduces source and implementation risk without predetermining CoCon’s Cooperative Continuum hypothesis.