Topic
Institutions, In Time: Designing Feedback Pathways for Shared Infrastructure Transitions

Electric utilities, challenged by a rapidly unfolding energy transition, use many informal institutions to bridge across technologies and sectors. Little is known, however, about how electric utility systems and other polycentric systems’ institutions-in-use vary and evolve over time. This presentation breaks down a novel engaged research method, the Nominal Group Technique, to solicit current, future, and potential institutions-in-use from 66 staff and board members across 18 electric utilities in a shared electric system in Minnesota. Matthew Grimley explores favored institutions for distributed energy resources like solar, electric vehicles, and batteries. Generating 578 ideas in total, his research uses the Institutional Grammar to create institutional statements and identify institutional configurations for current and desired feedback pathways across different infrastructures and actor groups. The results demonstrate the potential importance of structure and context-related adjustment mechanisms in designing change for shared infrastructure systems and the potential importance of information and payoff rules. Grimley seeks to advance understanding of change theories in polycentric governance systems, toward linear, parallel, recursive, and conjunctive dynamics that expand beyond evolutionary change theories. His findings show that engaged research methods can help converse between theory and practice, particularly in institutionally and technologically complex systems in periods of transition.