The institutions associated with natural resource management extend beyond visible and formal entities such as technical line departments, local government, community-based organisations or new emerging bodies like market associations.

A wide array of informal institutions influence decision-making and access to resources and this has consequences for project design and implementation. These informal institutions include customary practice associated with access rights, the locally legitimate role of different social groups and other pre-existing processes.

The performance of new introduced structures such as project management committees or resource user groups reveals much about the informal institutional environment that really matters and that profoundly influences decision-making and the quality of outcomes.

In our approach to evaluation and impact assessment we often take project structures and processes as the focal point and use them to examine the "fit" of project activities and targets with local context. We triangulate the interactions between a wide range of stakeholders and project structures to reveal a picture of expected and unexpected change and overall performance.

We provide process monitoring and process documentation support that helps projects track positive and negative changes as they emerge. The approaches draw on recent concepts of "institutional bricolage" and Most Significant Change in evaluation.

"Difficult & overlooked institutional issues in natural resource management - examples from fisheries co-management"