Käyhkö and colleagues shift attention from individual projects to the institutional fate of co-production. Their study asks what happens when practices initially developed as flexible, contextual responses begin to acquire rule-like status within research systems. Drawing on Finnish strategic research, they distinguish advanced, emerging and explorative levels of institutionalisation and contrast needs-based co-production with more transformative forms. The central insight is that durable co-production requires alignment across governance, resources, professional norms and organisational culture; repetition alone does not produce transformation. Institutionalisation is therefore ambivalent. It can stabilise collaborative practices, expand science-policy interaction and strengthen long-term capacity, but it can also normalise restricted versions of participation. Methodologically, the paper connects surveys and stakeholder interviews to institutional theory, particularly regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive dimensions. It bridges sustainability science and institutional sociology by showing that knowledge practices become consequential when they are embedded not only in projects but in the rules, expectations and resource structures that reproduce research itself.
