'Better' institutions don't lead to success; success leads to better institutions

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12/08/2014

'Better' institutions don't lead to success; success leads to better institutions

A key argument in institutional theory is that 'better' institutions (rules of the game) lead to success. This argument underpins many reforms aimed at producing best practice civil service systems, budget processes, legal mechanisms, anticorruption strategies, and more. Unfortunately, many many experiences show that the new best practice institutions often do not bring success. The new institutions are often not properly fitted to contexts, are unused, are not owned...and don't generate success.

The PDIA approach argues exactly the opposite to this: Success leads to better institutions. The argument emerges from observing many countries and governments known as examples of best practice. They typically did not introduce the best practice and wait for success--often because the best practice did not exist (they were the originator). Instead, they tried some things, saw some actually made things better, built support around these quick succeeses, learned to do those things again (but with some adaptations), found more success, learned and adapted again, and over time developed and diffused the emergent habits of practice, norms and rules...

In short, the best practices that developing countries are told to replicate actually emerged through processes of 'success leading to better institutions'.

I'm not saying that this is always the case, but I would argue strongly that any complex problem requires a 'success to institution' approach rather than an 'institution to success' approach. Largely because the challenge of complexity is such that we don't know ex ante what institution will work and make us better. We need to find and fit the institution by learning how to be successful and then entrenching what we learn as the new normal.

How many development processes embed this kind of thinking, or practice, or process?

Posted at 06:40 AM in Doing Development Differently | Permalink

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12/08/2014