Individuals create institutions to shape their interactions with other individuals, groups and with the systems around them. These institutions go through a constant process of change. Crawford and Ostrom (1995) developed a theory to study institutions by delving into the study of institutional statements. The authors developed a logical tool that they called the "Grammar of Institutions" (a grammatical syntax) to generate structural descriptions of institutional statements (Crawford and Ostrom, 1995). Crawford (2004) mentions that institutional statements can be expressed using two basic linguistic forms: constitutive statements and regulatory statements. The "Grammar of Institutions" has so far only been used to study regulatory statements. This thesis adapts the institutional grammar to study constitutive statements.To do so, I first created a new institutional grammar syntax for constitutive statements. Then, I applied this new grammar to a set of forest Laws from Paraguay with the objective of identifying all the main concepts crafted by Paraguayan forest legislations, and then analyzed the impact that these rules have on forests and their users. The contribution of this thesis is two-fold: first, it contributes to the development of tools for the systematic study of constitutive statements by approaching a field within institutions scholarship that has been ignored. Secondly, by applying the tool to the case of the laws of the forest of Paraguay, I draw attention to the fact that the use of forests is influenced by the policy-making processes, and that these processes have an impact over the biological composition of forests and the people that depend on them.
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