Adaptability is a key asset that makes regimes easier to modify than replace

Evidence

Regime participants can expand the regime beyond its original purposes, refine the range of cooperative arrangements, take on new tasks, or drop old goals. They can do so by either defining new purposes or adding new elements. This process of adaptation is a key feature of regimes and is encouraged because regimes (and the international organizations within them) are easier to modify than to create. An important limit to institutionalist theory is that it cannot tell us which mechanisms will ultimately be utilized—only that members will turn to existing institutions as a first step. — Robert B. McCalla, NATO’s persistence after the cold war, 113

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Framework of ‘easier to modify than to create’ offers a structural logic that parallels how institutions like NATO retask themselves, relevant to how trees-as-infrastructure and sacrifice-as-stabilizer both demonstrate repurposing of existing structures.
• XREF: connects to: International organizations adapt their functions to their members’ ongoing preferences. — Robert B. McCalla, NATO’s persistence after the cold war, 112; Flexibility demands adaption to a world that lacks continuity itself. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 169; Human-made systems like monarchies and borders are changeable rather than immutable. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 1121 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• People stretch old frameworks to fit new phenomena rather than abandon them #expands (0.82)
• Human-made systems like monarchies and borders are changeable rather than immutable. #expands (0.78) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1121
• Law changes by layered accretion rather than revolutionary overhaul. #exemplifies (0.75) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 75
• A mass repatriation can be managed through hundreds of adaptive laws. #exemplifies (0.73) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 496
• Flexibility demands adaption to a world that lacks continuity itself. #complicates (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 169
• Adaptation is original creation, not a compromised second-hand process #qualifies (0.71) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 898