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Emerging Institutions: Design or Evolution? |
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Rapid technological
developments, increasing population and global environmental change are the
driving factors behind the increasing complexity in today’s society. These new
developments have created tremendous complexity not only in the social,
technological and ecological layers of the society, but also in its
institutional structure. Institutional developments, i.e., creating rules that
govern the society, are not as gradual and static as they used to be. In fact,
environmental change and technological advancements call for rapid
institutional development by policy makers along with an increasing role of the
general public in changing existing institutions and creating new ones.
Modelling the evolution of the structure of the society, in particular the formal
institutional aspects (as opposed to cultural and normative dimensions) is a
multi-dimensional problem. It requires the consideration of multiple layers of
actors in one dimension and consideration of bottom-up (i.e. agents) and
top-down (i.e. institutions, laws and regulations) layers in another dimension.
The
general goal of this workshop is to gain an initial understanding of the
process of institutional change by achieving consensus about the terminologies
and concepts used in different disciplines and by reaching a collective
understanding about the best way(s) to model it. This would allow researchers
working on institutional changes to better understand its complexities by
building realistic models and analysing various scenarios of institutional
development. We aim to bring experts in these, and other, disciplines together for the first time, in order to make a
step forward in modelling and understanding institutional emergence by both
design and evolution in today’s rapidly evolving society. Our objectives are
to: 1)
Reach a common language and understanding
of what institutional emergence and evolution implies 2)
Become aware of the developments regarding
institutional emergence and evolution in different disciplines 3)
Become aware of the developments regarding
institutional design in different disciplines 4)
Understand how the different perspectives
and approaches can be bridged, complemented, and possibly integrated. [Back] |
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