Four square, five year olds, rules and adaptation

On Monday I had the pleasure of picking my son up from his after school program and was quickly recruited into a hard-charging game of four square. For those of you that don't know the basic structure of the game is four people each standing in one square of a quartered larger square while they bounce the ball to each other and try to make the other miss. For more in depth understanding you can go to youtube.com or http://www.squarefour.org/rules if you really want to soak up your time. Anyhow, while we were playing these five year old boys kept adding rules and wrinkles to how the game should be played. They spent more time discussing, trying to impose, and arguing about the rules instead of playing. This is perfectly normal but a backwards way to learn how to play a sport since there is less play than structure. Institutions are inflexible and multiplicative. In rugby pedagogy these days education insists that players should play and learn from that, adding structure only when it becomes necessary either to learn a new skill or advance understanding. Indeed the International Rugby Board has bought "teaching games for understanding's" ideas (http://www.ausport.gov.au/sportscoachmag/coaching_processes/teaching_games_for_understanding). I have applied these methods and watched them work wonders on players, and some coaches. But as a coach or coach-educator I can pretty much do what I want as long as the players or learners buy in without much threat of long term harm.
This is not the case with national policies. My student, Claudia Monzon is just about to defend her doctoral dissertation and her work addresses exactly this problem--how do states design policies in the national interest that are adapatable, local, specific, and subject to experimentation. She already has an excellent paper published about the problems of fit (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837714000532) between national or super-regional policies and environmental and cultural variation. James Scott's Seeing Like a State (http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300078152) and others' works have shown how governments are driven to impose order to maintain sovereignty and power. But as climate changes, local people strive for more independence, and information is more available challenges State rules. One of the challenges going forward for conservation with development and state policy in general arises in the State learning to allow variation in rules, accept variability and adaptation, while maintaining relevance. It may be that the most important function the State can offer is that of knowledge dissemination, analysis, and evaluation of adaptations tied to funding and increased democratization.