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Discussion Paper No.4
Moving Beyond 'Institutions Matter': Some Reflections on how
the 'Rules of the Game' Evolve and Change
Manoj Srivastava (DRC, DESTIN)
March 2004
This paper is a modest attempt to engage with the theories and debates on
institutions, (especially on institutional change) offered by the different
traditions working within the institutionalist perspective, to assess how
helpful they are in unravelling the complex set of issues and questions raised
above. I discuss four particularly relevant dimensions of an institutionalist
perspective, in order to unbundle the concept of institutions and institutional
change, as expressed through the abstract ideas of the structure and the
dynamics of ‘rules of the game’. In the first section, I briefly discuss the
first three issues, which are: (a) multiplicity and multi-layering of
institutions; (b) institutional arrangement; and (c) institutional
appropriateness. In the following section, the issue of institutional change is
examined in some detail. Three broad traditions or strands of the
institutionalist perspective, namely, (i) Rational Choice Institutionalism, (ii)
Historical Institutionalism, and (c) Sociological Institutionalism, are explored
here, to understand how strategic actions, conflicts around
asymmetrical power structure in polity and society, and engagements with the cultural systems of meaning
that pervade all aspects of life and society
– respectively the key themes or the conceptual constructs of these traditions
– help us to understand better why ‘rules of the game’ evolve and change.
The reflections draw attention to the fact that, though offering a few useful
ideas on institutional development in their own ways, none of them pays adequate
attention to the role of ideas and agency, and the multi-directional causal
relationships between them and institutions, which I argue are critical to
enriching the explanatory scope and depth of an institutionalist mode of
inquiry. In the concluding section, I offer brief comments to further highlight
this problem and offer a few thoughts on some possible alternative conceptual
constructs that may help to resolve the dilemmas in which these traditions are
engulfed, and highlight the need of developing and testing them through
empirical research into cases of institutional change.
Other Crisis States papers by Manoj Srivastava:
Working Paper No.60 (April 2005)
Crafting Democracy and Good Governance in Local Arenas: Theory, Dilemmas, and
their Resolution through the Experiments in Madhya Pradesh, India?
Download in English
Working Paper No.26 (March 2003)
The Dynamics of Achieving 'Power' and 'Reform' as a Positive-Sum Game: A report on the preliminary ethnographic explorations of the politics-governance nexus in Madhya
Pradesh, India
(Manoj Srivastava)
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