The anatomy of institutions: diagnosing the formation of legal rules

The explanation for the outcomes of environmental policies is often sought either in policy design or in the behaviour of street-level bureaucrats, thus tending to examine only one level of the policy process and neglecting its multi-level nested nature. Specifically, most of the studies omit addressing policy specification, which is located between design and adoption of primary legislation and the actions of public service workers. Considering the policy process as a multi-level nested process of shaping and carrying out legal rules, this paper uses an institutional economics approach and the institutional grammar tool for its analysis. Using the example of the Ukrainian soil protection policy, it examines the way legal rules are being co-created and the policy objectives shaped at the policy specification stage and discusses the implications for the discretion of street-level bureaucrats, behaviour of the policy target group, and soil protection. The results of the study reveal that the desired outcomes of the Ukrainian soil protection policy are undermined because many institutional statements written in primary legislation are not supported by the expectation of remedy in case of non-compliance and are therefore dysfunctional.

环境政策实施效果的解释往往要么聚焦于政策设计，要么着眼于街头官僚（street-level bureaucrats）的行为，进而仅对政策过程的单一维度展开分析，忽视了其多层嵌套的本质。具体而言，绝大多数研究均未涉及政策细化（policy specification）环节——该环节处于基础性立法（primary legislation）的制定与通过阶段，与公共服务人员的执行行为之间。本文将政策过程视为塑造与执行法律规则的多层嵌套过程，采用制度经济学（institutional economics）分析范式与制度语法工具（institutional grammar tool）开展研究。本文以乌克兰土壤保护政策为案例，考察政策细化阶段法律规则的共同塑造过程与政策目标的形成路径，并探讨其对街头官僚自由裁量权、政策目标群体行为以及土壤保护工作的影响。研究结果显示，乌克兰土壤保护政策的预期效果遭到削弱：诸多基础性立法中的制度性表述未配套设置违规救济预期，因此不具备实际执行效力。