2 PhDs on Institutions for Collective action

Across Europe, new bottom-up and self-governing institutions for the provisioning of energy, food, care and many other goods and services are currently increasingly being set up by citizens. Citizens hereby govern and use resources collectively according to the rules they decide upon as a group. These modern day forms of citizen collectivities have many similarities in institutional design with guilds, commons, cooperatives, and other institutions that have been developed in Europe’s history. UNICA ambitiously aims at building a unified theory that both explains the factors behind the development and spread of such “institutions for collective action” (ICAs) across Europe over the past millennium, In the project elements have contributed to the claim that they would be more resilient than top-down, share-holder types of organisations will be identified. This will be done by:

Creating a spatio-temporal taxonomy of archetypes of ICAs for the past millennium
Analyzing the scaling strategies of various ICAs over time
A study of the relationship between size and heterogeneity of both members and resources (for fishing collectivities and mutuals) and their impact on the institutional design of the ICA.