Institutional work focuses on the role of actors in creating, maintaining, or disrupting institutional structures. The concept has its origin in organisational studies. In this paper, we rethink and redefine institutional work to make it fit for use in the multi-actor and multi-level context of environmental governance. We survey key approaches to institutional change in the literature, and argue that institutional work should have a central place within this theorising. Drawing on the insights from this literature, we argue that studying institutional work should involve a look at both the actions taken by actors, as well as the resulting effects. We identify a critical need for attention to the fundamentally political character of institutional work, the cumulative effects of action taken by multiple actors, and communicative and discursive dimensions. Overall, the concept of institutional work opens up new possibilities for unpacking the longstanding challenge of understanding institutional change in environmental governance.

In this paper, we present a conceptual framework extending Foucaultian insights on the relations between power and knowledge to link up with current insights into studies of natural resource management (NRM) and more broadly environmental studies. We classify discourses in NRM according to understandings of social–ecological systems and argue that grasping those larger contexts can push NRM in a different direction, forming a base for more informed and inclusive decision-making. We then reconstruct the importance of materiality, the physical world, for the functioning of NRM within social–ecological systems. The concept of livelihoods is added to our developing Foucaultian frame, as material/discursive entwinements which structure responses of many stakeholders in NRM. Finally, we present an expansion of Foucaultian NRM into adaptive governance thinking as a logical outcome of basic insights into power/knowledge, developed and contextualized in current NRM and its critical analyses

We develop an evolutionary perspective on spatial planning to investigate the potential contributions of design approaches to the coordination of spatial organization. After a re-articulation of the concepts of planning and design in this perspective, we distinguish six essential features of the planning/design dialectics in a community. These aspects ought to be understood when evaluating the risks and benefits of design perspectives in a planning system, and the potential for re-positioning design in planning. It is argued that relying on the rhetoric of any single actor or any single tradition of reflection on planning and design is deceptive, whereas the collective experience of learning and adaptation with actors and disciplines expands the scope of understanding and the pallet of possible adaptations.