Our research focusses on the institutions – understood as the “rules of the game” – and how they impact environmental uses:
(1) How and why are resources (e.g. urban land, housing, alpine foodscapes, scenic landscape) regulated?
(2) Which strategies do actors develop to secure their access to resources?
(3) Which institutions can contribute to strong sustainability?
Over the years we have contributed to the development of a specific analytical framework, the Institutional Resource Regime (IRR) framework (e.g. Gerber et al. 2020).
After 20 years of existence and continuous development, the IRR framework has been established as an important supplement to existing (neo)institutional approaches focusing on the management of natural and human-made resources.