Institutional Cognition has developed as a scientific framework for understanding institutions not merely as formal organisations, administrative structures or collections of individual decision-makers, but as distributed cognitive systems capable of perceiving their environments, preserving and organising knowledge, interpreting information, coordinating multiple actors, making collective decisions, learning from experience and adapting their behaviour over time. The first generation of the IDHUS Working Papers established the principal research domains through which these phenomena can be investigated, extending the foundational theory of Institutional Cognition towards computational governance, human–AI intelligence, planetary coordination, measurement, simulation, comparative institutional analysis, applied experimentation and future institutional design. As this research architecture expands, however, a new scientific problem emerges. A growing theoretical system requires not only additional concepts but an explicit account of how its concepts, mechanisms, scales and research domains relate to one another.
This Working Paper addresses that problem by developing an integrated conceptual architecture for Institutional Cognition. Rather than introducing another independent theoretical layer, it examines how the principal components of the existing framework can be organised into a coherent multi-level system capable of supporting cumulative scientific investigation. The paper proposes that Institutional Cognition can be understood through interacting foundational, functional, architectural, operational and evolutionary layers. Within this structure, concepts such as distributed cognition, institutional memory, collective decision-making, computational governance, human–AI collaboration, institutional learning and planetary cognition are not treated as isolated theoretical constructs, but as components of a larger architecture through which institutional intelligence can be described across different organisational and systemic scales.
The paper therefore introduces the Institutional Cognition Conceptual Architecture (ICCA v1.0) as a first systematic model for integrating the theoretical structure of the field. The purpose of ICCA is not to close the conceptual development of Institutional Cognition, nor to establish a rigid taxonomy that predetermines future research. Its purpose is to provide a sufficiently stable yet revisable architecture through which concepts can be located, relationships can be examined, theoretical propositions can be compared, and subsequent operational models can remain interoperable across the wider IDHUS research ecosystem.
By moving from a growing body of theory towards an explicitly structured theoretical system, the paper represents a further step in the transition from constitutional foundations towards operational research. Institutional Cognition is thereby approached not simply as an interpretative framework for thinking about governance, but as a progressively formalised scientific architecture capable of supporting modelling, measurement, simulation, comparison and empirical investigation.
