Institutional architectures for social-ecological systems governance towards sustainability

Social-ecological systems’ dynamics challenge institutions and their functions. For a socio-ecological system to be sustainable, a balanced interdependence of societal and ecological systems is vital. Provided the diversity of social-ecological system contexts, different institutional functions are required for sustaining the balanced interdependence of a social-ecological system. In our paper, we perform a theoretical analysis and mapping of four context images of social-ecological systems that relate to four different institutional functions. Based on our analysis, institutions need to balance, to protect, to respond and to mitigate depending on the context conditions. For communicating context and systemic conditions, knowledge transfer transferred between the different actors and across the multiple administration and spatial levels is a critical principle and four knowledge transfer patterns are presented in accordance to proposed institutional functions. Our analysis implies that institutional architectures of socialecological systems have to allow institutional multiplicity, self-organized coordination and maintain flexible rigidity of formal institutions in order to address both social-ecological system’s and governance complexity and dynamics.