Governing contemporary commons: The Institutional Resource Regime in dialogue with other policy frameworks

This introductory article to the special issue on the Institutional Resource Regime (IRR) framework presents an overview of the latest developments of the framework. The IRR framework has been established as an important supplement to existing (neo)institutional approaches focusing on the management of natural resources. One of the major contributions of the IRR framework is its ability to appraise the institutional complexity of heterogeneous resource use situations at the nexus of public regulatory actions and private responses, to link the resulting institutional arrangements with claimants’ access to the resource, and to propose causal mechanisms explaining the relationship between institutions and sustainability.