Working on learning: how the institutional rules of environmental governance matter

Abstract

Learning among actors engaged in environmental governance can be a critical pathway toward institutional change. Learning, however, is often unintentional or idiosyncratic in environmental governance. This paper considers how the rules structuring an environmental governance process can enable or constrain the institutional work of learning. We draw insights from theories of learning and from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework's rule typology to identify how particular types of rules matter in learning. We examine how these insights can help uncover lessons from five empirical studies of learning in the environmental governance literature. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis for devising rules of environmental governance to intentionally foster learning.