Available online 18 April 2015
Teleodynamics and institutional change: The hardship of protecting the amur tiger, big leaf mahogany, and grey wolf
- Under a Creative Commons license
Open Access
Abstract
The
global biodiversity is in decline because modern societies are
organized for that purpose. The design, implementation and enforcement
of international, regional and national environmental policies have not
helped to turn the trend. In our paper, we analyze the hardship of the
protecting of the grey wolf in Finland, the big-leaf mahogany in Peru,
and the Amur tiger in Russia. Our comparative approach is based on the
old institutional economics, and our key concept - the unit of analysis -
is a transaction, i.e. enactment, practice and transfer of formal and
informal rights to future benefits. Transactions challenge, disturb and
re-organize the existing institutional scaffold. William Connolly (The Fragility of Things, 2013) and Terrence Deacon (Incomplete Nature, 2012) have recently argued that teleodynamics,
the purposeful and end-directed behaviors and the reactions and
disturbances in other related ententional behaviors are a key to
understand not only the dynamics of institutional change per se
but also, and especially so, the emergent patterns of behavior
resulting from resistance and adaptation. These teleodynamic
consequences reveal the problems in institutional fit, i.e. how the
institutional arrangements, particular customary circumstances and
habitual actors fit together. We abduct three types of emerging order
springing from the reactions to national biodiversity policies: (i) the
practice of faking the institutional fit, (ii) the practice of
disobedience, and (iii) willingness to take part in the making of new
institutional arrangements. These vary according to the purpose, working
rules (set of rights) and motivation. In a full paper, we explain the
interrelated meaning of purpose, working rules and motivation in the
context of institutional fit in detail. In our cases, the fit is not
exactly the one envisioned through the authoritative rules and the
purpose of institutional conservation, but it is an order nevertheless,
and that order is not necessarily good for endangered species.
Keywords
- Biodiversity;
- Policy;
- Institutional fit;
- Amur Tiger;
- Big Leaf Mahogany;
- and Grey Wolf
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