In this seminar, Irene will present her recently awarded grant, Resilient Rules, funded by the European Research Council. With this project, she will study institutions of small-scale agricultural systems around the world to answer key questions for global sustainability, such as How much institutional diversity exists? How is it distributed globally, and how is it evolving? And, more importantly, does institutional diversity and evolution enhance our ability to sustainably manage natural resources in our rapidly changing world? To address these questions, she will innovatively adapt tools used in the life sciences to study biological diversity to quantify institutional diversity, study the evolution of institutions, and assess the contribution of institutional diversity to long-term resilience to global change.