Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Resource Economics

However, such processes of social construction and deconstruction do not take place only in the social world; indeed, they are crucially conditioned and influenced by attributes of the physical and natural environment. Those physical stocks and natural systems humans want to extract matter or energy from, grow living organisms on, or dispose into, show a wide range of properties and are subjected to changing scarcities. The interconnected ecological, biological, geological, hydrological, marine and atmospheric subsystems of the earth system are extremely diverse and complex, ever changing and only understood by humans to a limited extent. This equally applies to the tools, technologies and infrastructures humans have developed - with an rapidly increasing speed of innovation and expansion over the last century - and set up to use, manage, cope with and also protect those systems such as farm machines, irrigation systems, logging equipment and fishing devices.

Such tools, technologies and infrastructures have enabled humans to increase their capacity to perform nature-related transactions which had an important impact. This is because these transactions have properties that are typical of natural systems - because these are not completely designed by humans like transaction that relate to engineered systems. Hence the interdependence between actors they cause may be different requiring also different institutions and governance structures that regularize the interaction of natural-technological and social-institutional systems.

Given this natural and technological context that influences the social construction of human behavior it is obvious that regularizing and governing the interrelationship of humans vis-à-vis the intertwined systems outline above natural and technological systems, which will affect simultaneously the relationship among themselves, cannot be achieved by few and simple social constructions. In contrast, such diversity and complexity in natural and associated technological systems requires require corresponding diversity and complexity in institutions and governance structures and forms, what is not only a plausible suggestion but has been theoretically and empirically substantiated in a by the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington, USA.

There is one theoretical and empirical conclusion which should be emphasized: Any institutional analysis of the interaction of natural-technological and social-institutional systems should start from explicitly accepting complexity and diversity. This means to refrain from oversimplification in institutional analysis and to be careful with theoretical approaches and empirical methods which may automatically imply oversimplification. For policy recommendations it is equally important to avoid blueprints that give the impression that they could be successfully applied anywhere independently from the physical and social context and the historical background. Elinor Ostrom’s famous warning of panaceas applies.