ABSTRACT

Institutional studies tend to be static analyses of the structure, operation and effects of institutions. This chapter shows how a multiplicity of ideas influenced the formation of one particular new institution in Australia in the late 1980s. It demonstrates how attempts to make the institution embody different values side by side sowed the seeds of institutional contradictions and instability. The embodiment of multiple ideas became a recipe for institutional incoherence. The Australia's Resource Assessment Commission (RAC) embodied conflicting ideas about the role of government agencies generally, and their role in environmental protection in particular. Institutional change in natural resource management in the 1980s and 1990s reflected the rise of environmentalism, a global phenomenon of the period. While committed to public participation, however, the RAC was also a bastion of expert-driven, rational-comprehensive scientific resource management. The demise of the RAC has implications for institutional reform in natural resource management, as well as for institutional design more generally.