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There is a lack of knowledge about the effectiveness and efficiency of soil conservation policies in agriculture and there is a little understanding of how policy measures should be designed to encourage farmers to adopt soil conservation practices. This paper analyses institutional settings surrounding agricultural soil management in ten European countries based on the Institutions of Sustainability (IoS) framework. This framework considers the interdependencies between ecological and social systems, taking into account environmental conditions, farming practices impacting on soil conservation, different types of actors, policies, institutions and governance structures. The purpose of this paper is to describe the analytical framework and the methodology that all case studies are based on, present and discuss compared findings, outline implications for successful soil conservation policy and draw conclusions on the methodological approach. The case studies focused on the main soil degradation types occurring across Europe which are addressed by a broad range of mandatory and incentive policies. The findings highlight the following issues: (i) the need to design policies that target the locally most common soil threats and processes in the light of agricultural management; (ii) the need to take farming management constraints into consideration, (iii) the need for good communication and cooperation both between agricultural and environmental authorities as well as between governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders; (iv) the necessary mix of mandatory and incentive instruments and (v) the need for data and monitoring systems allowing the evaluation of the effectiveness of policies and soil conservation practices.

The emergence, transformation and sustainability of farmers' cooperatives in post-socialist societies of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) require complex and diverse processes of institutional change. In this paper we discuss the conditions under which cooperatives develop and sustain and also the role of local and central actors using a case study approach. Since cooperatives in the socialist system provided numerous social services and contributed to rural development, another research question concerns the survival of this tradition. Through twin case studies in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and East Germany we present the conditions and strategies for achieving sustainability of co-operatives. The results reveal important requirements for cooperatives to be sustainable: overcoming the communist legacy of mistrust against cooperative organizations, convincing members by building trust, coping with fundamental collective action problems, constructive communication that takes the problems and ideas of members seriously, finding cooperative leaders able to cope with members' opportunism and a facilitating state encouraging the development of cooperatives.

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Breadth refers to the number of bundles held. Access rights have less breadth than do access and management rights together.

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This paper aims at explaining the role and importance of the evolution of institutions for sustainable agri-environments during the transition process by referring to examples of agri-environmental problems faced in Central and Eastern European countries. It is often stated that the replacement of institutional structures in post socialist countries would bring a unique opportunity to implement new policies and institutions needed to ensure that economic growth is environmentally sustainable. This idea stems from the assumption that the breakdown of the socialist system resembles that (of the Schumpeterian 1 type) of creative destruction -a process that incessantly revolutionizes economic structures from within. However, not all kinds of institutions, especially at local level, can simply be implemented, and even more, not incessantly. Instead, they evolve as a response to ecosystem and social system characteristics, and this is a rather slow process. A central question therefore is whether the required institutional arrangements for achieving sustainability in the area of agrienvironmental resource management can be built more easily in periods of transition as they fill institutional gaps, or whether processes of transition make institution building a more difficult and far more time consuming task than previously thought. Above all, we want to find out, how these two processes of institution building at different scales affect the sustainable management of resources such as water and biodiversity in agriculture? It will become clear that the agrienvironmental problem areas faced during transition are complex and dynamic and require adequate institutions both by political design and from the grassroots, to be developed by the respective actors involved. Transition from centrally planned to pluralistic systems has to be considered as a particular and in some respect non-typical process of institutional change. Popular theories of institutional change do not necessarily apply. The privatisation experience from many CEE countries will serve as an example. Finally, we will provide some examples of missing or insufficient interaction between political actors or agencies and people in CEE countries. Substantial investments into social and human capital, particularly regarding informal institutions are needed for institutions of sustainability to evolve.

There are two major discourses on cooperatives and cooperative organizations. One deals with cooperatives for product marketing, inputs, credit, housing, consumers and similar voluntary associations. The other focuses on collective action in the area of provision and management of natural resources, which is gaining in importance due to increasing resource degradation and scarcity. One of the main differences between these two types of cooperative is that the first uses resources artificially pooled by people, while the second uses pools of natural resources that pre-existed the cooperative, which are used by applying appropriate technologies and adding the necessary infrastructure. As the commons literature demonstrates, however, cooperative organization or natural resource management will only lead to successful and sustainable social construction for natural resources if a set of crucial conditions are fulfilled. After discussing two analytical frameworks, the paper presents four cases of institutional analysis of social-ecological systems. They show that actors' interdependence caused by the attributes of nature-related transactions plays a crucial role in institutional choice and the feasibility of collective action in natural resource management.