Do societies accumulate and transmit institutional capacities for collective action across generations and organisational forms, or are these capacities repeatedly reinvented?
CoCon tests this possibility through the hypothesis of the Cooperative Continuum: organisations may disappear while elements of the governance knowledge developed within them remain available within societal repertoires, allowing them to be transmitted, transformed and recombined across organisational and generational boundaries. Research on institutional change has shown how institutional arrangements persist through transformation (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010; Streeck & Thelen, 2005; Thelen, 1999), while work on diffusion and institutional transfer demonstrates that institutional arrangements can travel between settings (Dobbin et al., 2007; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000). Organisational memory research further shows how accumulated experience can become encoded and retained in routines and rules. CoCon asks whether these processes extend beyond individual organisations: whether societies possess an institutional memory for cooperation that can survive organisational dissolution and cross organisational and generational boundaries. Institutional rules provide an analytically tractable expression of such governance knowledge, capturing how communities organise participation, rights and responsibilities, decision-making, monitoring, conflict resolution, and adaptation (Crawford & Ostrom, 1995; De Moor et al., 2016; Frantz & Siddiki, 2021). Institutions stabilise, reproduce, adapt and transmit this distributed knowledge, potentially allowing it to survive generational turnover and organisational disappearance.
CoCon will reconstruct the evolution of institutional rules for collective action from approximately 1000 CE to the present and determine whether recurrent governance arrangements are best explained by institutional inheritance, functional convergence, mixed origins or insufficient evidence. This millennium-long perspective is essential: only across repeated cycles of institutional emergence, transformation, disappearance and re-emergence can inherited institutional capacities be distinguished systematically from solutions independently generated under similar conditions (De Moor, 2021). CoCon does not equate formal rules with cooperation, which may also depend on norms, values, trust, and social relations; it isolates one historically traceable dimension of collective capacity and situates it within the wider cooperative systems in which those rules operate (De Moor et al., 2016).