Our research team is dedicated to the study of institutions for collective action - institutional arrangements that are formed by groups of people in order to overcome certain common problems over an extended period of time by setting certain rules regarding access to the group (membership), use of the resources and services the group owns collectively, and management of these resources and services. Such institutionalised forms of collective action differ from what is usually referred to as collective action, in the sense of large-scale mass movements that often can only make their point via riots, demonstrations or forms of mass violence (e.g. peasant revolts). We not only deal with types of institutions that originated far back in history, such as guilds, commons, waterboards and beguinages, but we also use our expertise towards present-days examples of institutions for collective action, such as citizens' cooperatives.