Exploring understandings of institutions and uncertainty: new directions in natural resource management

It argues that conventional understandings of institutions fail to focus on how they deal with the ever-increasing forms of uncertainty impinging on rural livelihoods. The paper outlines three different forms of uncertainty: ecological, livelihood and knowledge uncertainty.

By reviewing a large literature, the paper demonstrates how conventional understandings of institutions neglect the everyday contexts within which institutions are located and the overlapping domains between different institutional arrangements. By drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches to understanding institutions and by exploring case studies around water, pastoralism and biotechnology, the paper argues that a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between institutions and uncertainty calls for a radical re-thinking of conventional ways of viewing resources, legal systems and, property regimes.

This calls for new forms of governance, inclusionary decision-making arenas, the addressing of questions of power and the overhauling of sharp dichotomies between local and the global as well as formal and informal processes.