CoCon will test whether self-governed cooperation constitutes an evolving institutional logic alongside markets and states and develop a general evolutionary theory of Institutions for Collective Action. The objective is to shift the study of collective action from explaining how individual institutions function to explaining how societies develop capacities for self-governance over historical time. It will open a new research agenda on how institutional knowledge accumulates, travels between organisations and societies, is lost, and can be regenerated—providing a new basis for explaining why societies differ in their capacity to organise collective responses to shared challenges.

The scientific breakthrough will be a theory of the long-term evolution of cooperative institutional capacity: explaining when governance knowledge remains available beyond the organisations in which it developed, when it is transmitted, transformed and recombined across organisational and generational boundaries, and when similar solutions are independently reconstructed (Walsh & Ungson, 1991). CoCon thereby shifts the unit of explanation from individual Institutions for Collective Action to the institutional repertoires through which societies retain, lose and renew capacities for self-governance. In doing so, it will establish a longitudinal framework for distinguishing institutional inheritance from independent adaptation—an unresolved problem wherever similar institutional arrangements recur across time and place. By establishing whether these repertoires display recurrent and distinctive principles of self-governance across otherwise different organisational forms, CoCon will provide the historical basis for assessing whether self-governed cooperation constitutes a distinctive institutional logic of societal coordination (Thornton et al., 2012).

Find out more about:

• The CoCon Observatory
• SICADE approach
• Longitudinal Institutional Grammar
• Participatory archiving
• ABM

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