Comparing the Institutional Design of Polycentric Systems for Protecting Water Quality: an Application of the Grammar of Institutions to the Ruhr River and the New York City Watersheds.

Of enduring interest to scholars of public administration and related fields is the design and impacts of institutions (e.g., laws, regulations, social norms) used to govern behavior. Evaluating the design of institutions entails assessing their content to understand how it is structured, as well as the information it conveys about who can do what, when, and how. This is important because rules are set up to resolve common pool resource dilemmas by supporting cooperation and coordination among actors. Knowing more about the structure of rules, and comparing them across cases aids scholars and practitioners in understanding rules and their potential impact. In this paper we use the grammar of institutions, developed by Crawford and Ostrom, to compare the institutional designs of two governing arrangements – the German water law governing the Ruhr River and the intergovernmental agreement for protecting and managing the New York City watersheds. Laws and policies were coded using the grammar of institutions. From that coded data, network analysis techniques will be used to identify and examine the structure of collaboration networks based on aggregation rules, information networks based on information rules, and public goods provision networks based on choice rules for the two cases. We focus on the rule linkages between different government actors to explore features of polycentric governance within each watershed, such as the types of relations among different decision making centers, and compare them. The paper concludes with next steps for identifying additional institutional design features and combining institutional and behavioral data in further analyses.