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.

环境政策的实施效果往往被归因于政策设计（policy design）或是街头官僚（street-level bureaucrats）的行为，因此此类研究大多仅考察政策过程的单一层级，忽视了其多层嵌套的内在属性。
具体而言，绝大多数现有研究均未涉及政策细化（policy specification）环节——该环节处于正式立法（primary legislation）的制定与通过，与公共服务人员的具体行动之间。
本文将政策过程视为一个塑造与执行法律规则的多层嵌套过程，采用制度经济学分析范式与制度语法（institutional grammar）工具展开研究。
本文以乌克兰土壤保护政策为案例，考察了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，并探讨了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：诸多写入正式立法的制度性表述，并未配套设置违规情况下的救济预期，因此这些条款实际上是失效的。