The institutional grammar tool in policy analysis and applications to resilience and robustness research

Resilient and robust natural resources management institutions have the ability to adapt (be resilient to) or withstand (be robust to) endogenous and exogenous shocks. While resilience and robustness are relatively easily defined, their empirical assessment and measurement are more challenging. With institutions understood as the individual rules, norms, and shared strategies used to organize repeated interactions between people, assessment of institutional resilience and robustness requires a rigorous and standardized approach to identifying and categorizing these rules, norms, and shared strategies. This article provides a review of the origins and theoretical foundations of the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT), a method developed to address the challenge of empirical assessment. The article builds on and extends existing applications in the literature to demonstrate how the IGT is a compatible method with several frameworks for analysis and evaluation of resilience and robustness in natural resources governance.