Every institution faces the same fundamental paradox. Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation problem – we’ve simply moved it back one step. So why do institutions work at all? To understand this puzzle, we need to first ask what makes human cooperation so extraordinary in the natural world.

Cooperation is everywhere in nature. Walk through any forest, peer into any tide pool, observe any meadow, and you’ll witness countless partnerships that seem to defy the brutal logic of natural selection. Far from being mysterious, these alliances follow predictable patterns that evolutionary biologists have come to understand well. A handful of basic mechanisms explain cooperation from ant colonies to coral reefs: kinship, reciprocity and reputation.

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The answer is reputation. The community itself ensures institutional integrity through the same social forces that sustain cooperation among strangers. The guarded guard the guardians.