Institutional change and persistence in German recreational-fisheries governance in response to external and internal challenges

New institutional economics (NIE) offers a vibrant research area of developed concepts and theories to explain institutional change and persistence in social-ecological systems. However, two restrictions can be identified and are addressed in this work. First, the conceptualization of nature-related transactions and their properties requires more analytical and empirical attention to study human motivations in institutional change processes in social-ecological systems. Second, researchers are encouraged to extend their investigations about the recent inclusion of systems-based analytical concepts from the resilience school in NIE in order to enhance the understanding of institutional change and persistence in natural resource governance. This enhanced NIE perspective is illustrated using German recreational-fisheries (GRF) governance, which is investigated in two contextual situations: 1) the differently arranged governance structures in East and West German recreational fisheries, and 2) the various challenges (external shock vs. internal modest dynamics) prompting reactions such as institutional change for GRF governance. The results show that institutional alignment of governance structures can be differently organized according to particular properties of nature-related transactions. The results question general determinism towards the organization of governance systems of natural resources. This research also demonstrates that multiple sets of reasons influence human decision making and such reasons lever out characteristics of the contextual situations, revealing that actor-based theories from NIE are decisive for explaining institutional change and persistence in social-ecological systems.