Within governance emergence approaches, a distinction is made between approaches that assume it is possible to generalise beyond a single case, and those that do not. In the latter case, anthropological and ethnographic approaches that assume that this is theoretically not feasible. In contrast, approaches from new institutional economics which have made significant and extensive contributions to the natural resource and water management literature (e.g., Ostrom, 2005; Hagedorn et al. 2002; Bougherara et al. 2009) assume that insights can be generalised beyond single case studies on a higher level of abstraction. While the abovementioned assumption of complexity making prediction difficult limits the generalisable conclusions from any particular study about which institutions lead to which outcomes, the accumulation of evidence has led to conclusions about general characteristics of socialecological systems that can be related to desirable outcomes. A description of these methods, with examples, is provided in the  Toolbox section on institutional analysis.