Seeing institutions in different ways

Introduction

The central focus of development studies is how social and economic change can be achieved successfully. Critical to this success is institutional development, as it is through developments in institutions that development in the policies that drive change can be achieved. However, institutions are rich and complex phenomena, and institutional development is a rich and complex process. It is therefore possible and necessary to look at institutions from different angles and see them in different ways. This free course encourages you to do exactly that, in order to establish a base from which to think about institutional development.

This course presents you with three widely accepted ways of seeing institutions:

1. Institutions as rules and norms: We will look at the differences between institutions and organisations, and how they relate to each other. The course also suggests that, if institutions are seen as rules governing social life, then it seems appropriate to view institutional development as a matter of changing the rules.
2. Institutions as meanings and values: This course suggests that resistance to change can be seen as arising when and because that change has no meaning for people who are expected to accept it, or it offends their deeply-held values. Resistance thus generated can be particularly powerful and effective because so much is at stake.
3. Institutions as big players: This course draws attention to the centrality of power and power relationships in institutional development, and shows how institutional development involves power struggles.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course TU872 Institutional development: Conflicts, values and meanings.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• understand different ways of thinking about institutions and institutional development

• appreciate that institutions in processes of development create pictures of institutional landscapes

• understand some of the factors that can promote or hinder institutional development

• locate yourself in the institutions significant for life and work.

1 Institutions as rules and norms

Institutions frame our lives. From birth through to death, in the most private and the most public aspects of our lives, in our personal and professional histories, we are shaped by – and we in turn shape – institutions. They give structure and meaning to our lives. They make shared experience, and shared action, possible. In short, we live our lives – as social beings – through institutions.

I can put this in more formal, academic terms. Teddy Brett, who has contributed a great deal to the theory and practice of institutional development in various parts of the world over the past 50 years, talks of institutions in terms of ‘sets of rules’ (see Box 1).

This is a passage that I would invite you to spend some time thinking about. It brings together so many things worth saying about institutions, all of which serve to establish the significance of institutions. Before I turn to single out and discuss two terms, ‘rules’ and ‘norms’, let me highlight some of the other important points in this passage:

• the shared knowledge that underpins institutions
• the habits, customs and routines which are also expressions of institutions
• the relationship between institutions and organisations
• the way institutions make collective action possible.

All these are points worth exploring; the last is of particular significance. However, I want to identify and answer what I take to be the central question this passage raises:

1.1 Rules, norms and institutions

One way of getting at what Brett is saying is to think of the expression, ‘as a rule’. It’s a term that indicates the way in which life is expected to be conducted in particular contexts. Thus, for example, in contemporary liberal democratic societies, ‘as a rule’:

• children between particular ages go to school (the institution of education or schooling)
• leaders are elected by popular vote (the institution of democracy)
• people with insufficient income receive benefits in cash or kind (the institution of welfare)
• people have a choice as to how and from whom they obtain goods and services (the institution of the market)
• although not only characteristic of liberal democracies, wealth is distributed unequally (the institution of inequality).

Note, incidentally, that I have specified a context in which these ‘rules’ can be identified: ‘in contemporary liberal democratic societies’. Like any other social phenomena, institutions need to be seen in their particular place and time to understand the reasons for the form they take: educational institutions, for example, may be centralised or decentralised; the market may be more or less regulated.

You might want to challenge my identification of these rules, suggest that I have in one way or another got them wrong. For example, a colleague has suggested that the last institution on my list – the institution of inequality – is rather different from the preceding four:

This is a useful challenge. It raises two important points. One is that institutions should not be seen in isolation, but rather as connected with one another, with the connections themselves making a difference. I would in this case stick with calling the ‘difference’ – the inequality – an institution, but perhaps a ‘higher-level’, overarching institution. The other – signalled by the term ‘institutionalised’ – draws attention to the fact that when we are talking about institutions and institutional development what we are talking about is ‘built-in’, part of the fabric of society: there – more or less – permanently.

The process of challenge is an important part of our exploration of institutions and institutional development. I hope you will follow my colleague’s example and question what I have to say and offer your own interpretation.

Whether or not you accept ‘my’ rules, I hope you can see that institutions in this sense – as rules – provide guidance as to what people should do, how they should behave, the paths their lives should follow. I hope you can also see that, behind the rules, there are sanctions for not complying with them.

I’ve looked at the first of the two terms, rules. What of norms? There is in fact a lot of overlap between the two terms, certainly in the sense that both rules and norms provide guidance as to how people should behave in society. Norms, though, are often seen more as beliefs about what is acceptable behaviour, views as to the qualities people should display in their social lives. So, for example, honesty, loyalty and reciprocity may be norms.

Don’t, though, be misled into thinking that norms are expressions of what constitutes ‘good’ behaviour by the list I have just presented. Corruption may be a norm, in the sense, for example, that it is expected and acceptable that bribes be offered to public servants in return for favours. Rules and norms are not in any straightforward way to be seen in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

1.2 Institutions as sets of rules and norms

Brett goes further than referring to rules and norms. He talks about ‘sets of rules’ (and by extension he might as well say ‘sets of norms’). This is important, as I indicated in relation to my colleague’s challenge. Institutions – as rules and norms – don’t exist in isolation, but rather can be seen to be connected with each other in any given society.

Douglass North is one important theorist who has promoted this idea. It can be taken too far! One of North’s followers put it like this:

That is taking the idea of the connectedness of institutions too far. Sometimes ‘directives’ are ‘mutually supporting’, sometimes they are not. Nonetheless, rules do overlap, as is better suggested in the following statement:

This valuably suggests that when looking at institutions with a view to changing them – changing the rules and norms – you need to look for these connections. You need in fact to see the whole institutional landscape in which the change will take place.

As Brett indicates, the rules and norms are not necessarily written down: norms very rarely are. Some rules will be, but in all these cases – and in any others – written rules will be complemented with unwritten ones, and those unwritten rules can be the ones that act most powerfully on us as ‘incentives or sanctions’.

And, of course, different people will interpret the rules in different ways – and some will break them or work outside them.

You might like to think about and comment on these last two points, perhaps in the light of the (I think) useful idea I cited above of institutions as the ‘rules of the game’. But now I want to pick up another key point raised in the statement from Brett: the relationship between ‘institutions’ and ‘organisations’.

1.3 ‘Institutions’ and ‘organisations’

Brett sees institutions in terms of rules and norms. But his central concern is not to define institutions, but rather to establish their significance. To do this, amongst other things, he distinguishes between institutions and organisations.

Brett describes organisations as ‘actors in society’. Organisations get things done or, to follow the metaphor, they act, they perform. By contrast, institutions provide the framework in which the performance occurs. Thus, for example:

• schools teach children, within the framework of the institution of education
• political parties seek votes, within the framework of the institution of democracy
• public and voluntary agencies provide benefits, within the framework of the institution of welfare
• supermarkets and other shops compete to provide goods, within the framework of the institution of the market
• companies give different financial rewards to different employees, within the framework of the institution of inequality.

And, of course, some organisations will perform better than others, and, as with people, some will act outside the institutional framework – and will sometimes break the rules.

Is the difference clear-cut?

In an everyday sense, the short answer is, ‘no’. As you will probably already appreciate, there is a considerable overlap between institutions and organisations. Organisations can become institutions as they become established and recognised as standing for something more than themselves; they come to embody and express important social norms and values.

This can perhaps be seen most obviously in a global context, with organisations such as the World Bank or the United Nations. But it is no less true at a local level where, for example, a school can come to be recognised as having a significance far beyond its own gates, or a shop can come to be seen as a place not just where buying and selling take place but also where key neighbourhood concerns are identified and expressed.

But the question can be answered in a rather different, and no less important, way: with an answer perhaps closer to a ‘yes’. We can look at precisely the same social entity – the school you attended, for example, the agency you work for – though two different lenses: an organisational lens and an institutional lens.

With the organisational lens, in the case of your school, you might be looking at, say, the range of classes in the school, the different ways in which teaching takes place in different classes. With the institutional lens, you might be looking at the wider ‘rules’ which, for example, require schools to arrange classes by age or by ability.

With the organisational lens, in the case of your agency, you might be looking at, say, your work on a poverty reduction programme. With the institutional lens, you might be looking at, the wider ‘rules’ which, for example, require that your agency works in ‘partnership’ with other agencies.

In the latter case, note that what I am calling the ‘rules’ might be set down in the tendering procedures, setting the terms on which your agency can participate in the programme. They might, equally, take the form of a less formal – but no less binding – understanding that ‘this is how we do development’.

My particular interest in this course is in the institutional lens, because that is the one that is focused on the rules and norms, formal and informal, that guide our behaviour and the behaviour of our organisations. This is not, though, to deny the value of the organisational lens – which, amongst other things, focuses on how the rules are interpreted and put into practice.

1.4 Institutions as rules and norms in your life and in development

In this section you will explore the ideas of rules and norms so far discussed in relation to your own experience and in relation to development. Activity 1 gives you an opportunity to connect your own experience and understanding with this first way of seeing institutions, as rules and norms.

You may have found distinguishing between institutions and organisations problematic – in which case it may be useful to reinforce the three points I made in introducing the distinction:

1. Brett’s key concern is to identify organisations as ‘actors in society’. (He is not, incidentally, dismissing the idea that individuals also are actors.) Institutions provide the framework within which organisations (and individuals) act and the rules which guide their actions. Note, though, that – to follow the acting metaphor – institutions do not write or provide the script for the actors.
2. It is entirely appropriate to talk of particular social entities as both institutions and organisations. But more generally, there will be an institutional dimension to any organisation, simply because in the nature of social life it will embody and express certain rules that have an existence and significance beyond its own boundaries.
3. Perhaps most importantly, you can use both an organisational lens and an institutional lens to investigate any social entity. I will focus on the latter, but that is not to dismiss the value of the former.

You can use these points as you turn now to look at the world of development through an institutional lens.

1.5 Institutional development: changing the rules, the rules changing

As you undertook Activity 2, you might have noted that institutions last: they have a seeming permanence to them. Brett uses the term ‘stable’, others say that institutions ‘persist over time’ (Uphoff, 1986, p. 9). That is the nature of institutions: they are around for a long time – it is one of their defining qualities. Yet institutions are not ‘forever’. Or, to use one of the concepts I have set out with, the ‘rules’ do change.

However stable they might seem, institutions are constantly changing. They come into being, mature, change – and they usually, if not always, come to an end. Their historical rise, decline and fall can be traced – though in some cases the perspective has to be exceedingly long term.

The nation-state is one of the most obvious examples. Emerging in – let’s say for the sake of the argument – the 17th century in western Europe, the nation-state came to be the dominant institutional form for framing both societies and the relationships between societies. In the 21st century that period of unqualified dominance has ended: the rule no longer holds good.

A variety of other institutions, supra-national ones – such as the European Union, G8, the World Trade Organisation, transnational corporations, to name only some of the more obvious – are increasingly dominant. At the same time, intra-national institutions – often, though by no means exclusively, built around ethnic or national identity – have challenged the right of the state to govern all the people within a particular geographical territory.

Even in the cases of institutions which seem to go on forever – the family and faith are perhaps the most significant examples – the form of the institution, the relationships involved, the norms and values embedded, the rules, differ so markedly that they constitute different institutions at different times and in different places. Certainly there is continuity, no less certainly there is change.

It is clearly possible and useful, as suggested by the terms just used – ‘created’, etc. – to think of change as coming about as a result of deliberate action: the change is intended. It is equally possible and useful to think of change as emerging – in a way no one exactly intended – out of the complex of social interactions that make up history.

This distinction between the more and less intentional processes is of importance for our understanding of institutional development. So take, for example, the emergence of the labour movement in the UK as an illustration of institutional development in its more and less intentional aspects. It is clear that groups of women and men came together to establish specific bodies that together made up the labour movement: they intended to change their working lives for the better by this means.

But this does not tell the whole story. These actions were not taken in isolation. They connected with the actions of many more people, pursuing their own particular and different purposes. And all were caught up in a range of complex processes, not just that one leading to the emergence of the labour movement: the development of new technologies, the establishment of factories that the technologies made possible, the consequent rural–urban migration, the emergence of large urban settlements. These were certainly not intended to bring about the labour movement. Yet the deliberate actions that created the labour movement were made possible and shaped by those processes, which were, in turn, shaped by the deliberate actions that established the labour movement.

Much the same argument could be made about the emergence, say, of liberation movements in the colonised world, of the movement for women’s emancipation, of the anti-globalisation campaign, of the movement to secure human rights in the face of massive abuse. All have been created through the purposive, value-oriented action of individuals and groups, often in the face of great personal danger. Equally, all have involved interactions between a range of actors with differing values, interests and agendas. And all have arisen in the context of broader social and economic processes – most obviously to do with changes in labour markets – which certainly have not been intended to bring about these specific developments.

It would be wrong to think that these are two different and separate processes – the intentional and the unintentional. As I have tried to convey, they are intimately bound up with each other, in real life inseparable. Nonetheless, there is value – as in my discussion of institutions and organisations – in thinking of and using two different lenses: one lens as ‘institutional development as intervention’, where the focus is on intentional activity, and the other lens as ‘institutional development as history’, where the focus is on a long process of interactions between diverse actors, a process which at any given point provides the context that determines the scope and potential for interventions.

Note that both lenses enable us to examine and explain changes in Brett’s ‘rules that structure social interactions’.

1.6 A story of changing the rules

I said earlier, introducing the idea of institutions as ‘rules’, that ‘different people will interpret the rules in different ways – and some will break them or work outside them.’ ‘Breaking the rules’ is one way of thinking about institutional development.

The story you are about to read is a story about, amongst other things, ‘breaking the rules’, and thus a story about institutional development. It is a story that many years after I first read it I still find exhilarating, still find a source of insights into institutional development. It is – as are all stories – a partial story, a story told by and from the perspective of one person inside the story, indeed one of the creators of the story. It is, as will be evident from the very opening words, a story about him as well as a story about institutional development.

For me, this individual perspective heightens the value of the story, partly because it reminds me that institutional development depends on individual agency, and partly because it leaves me very aware that other stories could be told, by people with different experiences of this process of institutional development, and I can try to imagine those stories.

But on to the story! It’s the story of the creation of BancoSol, a Bolivian micro-finance agency, as told by Pancho Otero, one of the founders of this ‘solidarity bank’.

1.7 Looking at BancoSol through a different lens

I suggested that Otero was using an ‘institutional development as intervention’ lens when looking at BancoSol’s history. I want to conclude my account of BancoSol by briefly looking through the other, ‘institutional development as history’, lens.

Otero provides a story of action from the point of view of the activist. What we don’t get is a proper sense of the context in which that action was taken, the history it becomes part of. The ‘history’ lens enables us to do this. The following brief extract from a paper on the development of micro-finance illustrates what I mean:

It doesn’t take away from the brilliance of the ‘dedicated individuals’ to recognise that they were operating within a historical context which provided opportunities which they were able to exploit. Nor, of course, does it detract from the significance of their breaking of the rules of Bolivian banking.

2 Institutions as shared meanings and values

I have chosen to make use of the concepts of ‘rules’ and ‘norms’ as my first way of seeing institutions, thus making it possible to see institutional development as a process that involves changing the rules, or even breaking them (and, I should say, going against established norms and creating new norms). The BancoSol story, as I’ve suggested, can certainly be seen in these terms.

It is, however, possible to read it in a different, though not contradictory, way. You may have noticed the attention Otero – and I – paid to the cultural dimension, where ‘cultural’ is taken to refer to all those things – values, meanings, norms, principles and practices – that give people a sense of identity and enable them to make sense of the world and their place within it. It is this dimension to which I’m turning for my second way of seeing institutions, as conveyors of meanings and values.

Early on in his first workshop talk, Pancho Otero makes an interesting comment that is both confession and affirmation:

And you may recall that in his third workshop talk, having described the ‘fever’ brought about by his realisation of the scale of the ‘transformation’ he was envisaging, he says that ‘after the fever went down and after we thought about this for a few days we sat with the major staff and talked about this. Little by little it started to make sense’ (Otero, 1997, p. 61).

The idea of ‘making sense’ is fundamental to institutional development to enable wider developmental change to occur.. The change must make sense to those caught up in it, be they clients, development managers, sponsors, or whomsoever. Put in other words, the change must be meaningful and of value to those who experience it, whether as instigators or as ‘beneficiaries’. This in turn requires that it engages with the meanings through which they live and understand their lives. It also requires it to correspond with the values by which people live their lives, their sense of what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. Only then will the change be seen as legitimate.

This idea of institutions as conveyors of shared meanings and values takes us back to the initial definition of institutions in Box 1. In order to behave according to spoken or unspoken ‘rules’, their meaning has to be understood, individually and collectively.

The reality of institutional development, though, is typically that meanings and values are not shared by all those involved in it, as is emphasised in the following preface to another story of institutional development.

2.1 Structure and action

Sociologists have long struggled with what it is that influences and determines the way people behave. To simplify matters enormously, I can say there are two basic approaches:

• the ‘structural’ approach, which holds that social structures – such as the family we are born into, the schools we go to, the political parties available for us to join, the jobs market, the media – which are just ‘there’, determine people’s actions; and
• the ‘action’ approach, which holds that people interpret the world, internalise it and endlessly remake it – making choices, acting on the structures, and thereby changing them.

The two views are not separate or oppositional (though, in the history of sociology, there has been fierce debate between them). Engberg-Pedersen argues that whilst institutions – which, as you will gather, can be seen as structures – give meaning to action they ‘should not be viewed as external constraints’ on social actors. They do not determine in any absolute sense how people behave. Actors are not ‘cultural dopes’: they have the capacity to reflect on the institutional context and act on the basis of their reflections.

This is a premise that informs our approach to institutional development. But we take it a step further. Not only do people – more specifically, development managers – have the capacity to reflect on the institutional context, they have an obligation to do so. This is a necessary contribution to institutional development.

3 Institutions as ‘big players’

There is one way of seeing institutions that demonstrates the value of holding together an ‘action’ approach and a ‘structural’ approach to understanding social behaviour and change.

When talking of, in particular, international development we often make reference to agencies such as the World Bank, the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, the African Union, the European Union, the Economic Commission for Latin America, national governments, to give just a few of the most obvious examples: the ‘big players’. Their size, their bigness, is important: they dominate the worlds of development in ways that other agencies cannot match, and this invests their action with great significance. Note, though, that these agencies can also be seen as institutions in the ways I have already discussed: they set the rules for development, they provide frameworks of meaning – structures – within which they expect other actors to negotiate.

Another way of recognising the significance of the big players is to suggest they establish the ‘dominant orthodoxy’ of development. What does this term mean?

It refers to the key norms and values, the accepted principles and practices, through which development is undertaken. The content of the dominant orthodoxy changes over time. Today we might talk about a ‘prevailing growth-centred vision’ (Korten, 1990, p. 4), the value attached to ‘market forces’ and privatisation, the central role ascribed to ‘good governance’, the reframing of the state as an ‘enabler’, and the focus on partnership building and the participation of diverse stakeholders in the planning and implementation of interventions. We would certainly recognise the central role played by the Millennium Development Goals in current development discourse – perhaps more in the north than the south.

It is important not to overstate the bigness, the dominance, of these institutions and to recognise that, even if they establish the framework within which development is to take place, other actors have or create room for manoeuvre within that framework. It is also important to recognise that the dominant orthodoxy is an arena of constant struggle, as individuals and agencies challenge the dominant norms and values, work outside the dominant principles and practices. As a consequence, the dominant orthodoxy itself undergoes constant change. Nonetheless, the big players feature largely in the institutional landscape of development.

3.1 Power

‘Power’ is a concept without which institutions as sets of rules and norms cannot be properly understood: power to make the rules, power to question and break them, power to establish the norms. The same point can be made about institutions as sets of meanings and values: the power to bring in new meanings, the power conferred by meaning to resist such interventions, the power to establish what is right and – no less critically – what is wrong. And, as Hulme shows, it is a concept without which we cannot see and understand the actions and interactions of the big players.

The picture presented in Box 4 will give you a sense of the way in which power – interestingly (and unusually) as a process rather than something people possess – works:

In its own way – it is highly abstract – this is as rich a picture as that offered by Hulme, one that will help you appreciate the politics of institutional development.

4 Extending ways of seeing institutions

I have suggested three ways of looking at institutions:

1. as sets of rules and norms, that govern how people behave and how organisations operate, and that make it possible for agents with different interests, world-views and agendas to work together for development (Brett)
2. as conveyors of shared meanings and values, that enable people to make sense of their world and identify what is acceptable, and legitimate, or not (Engberg-Pedersen)
3. as big players, that are influential in establishing the terms on which development is to take place (Hulme).

This suggests in turn that institutional development can be seen as, amongst other things:

• changes in the rules, attempts to bring in new rules, attempts to make the old rules more appropriate, challenges to the old rules, shifts in social norms
• the emergence and acceptance of new sets of meanings, attempts to reinforce established meanings, challenges to established meanings, the promotion of new values
• the introduction of new policies and programmes to ‘deliver’ development, the emergence of new big players, the creation of new alliances between big players, challenges to the power and authority of the established big players.

4.1 Questioning institutions and institutional development

Whilst encouraging you to develop your own sets of questions, I would also encourage you to make use of a set of questions that have – for quite obvious reasons – been labelled the ‘five Ws and H’ and that are used as a formal technique for exploring social processes, including the way those processes are thought about. The five Ws and H are: What? Who? Where? When? Why? and How?

Like any technique, the five Ws and H is neither perfect nor all-sufficient. You may find your own set of questions better. Or you may think that, for example, a stakeholder analysis is needed to address fully the ‘Who’ question and bring out the interests involved more effectively.

The technique does, though, provide one means of interrogating particular processes in a relatively structured, systematic fashion. And in its simplicity it can generate ‘awkward questions’, questions that get under the surface of a process or way of thinking, questions that expose the reality underneath the surface.

Applied to institutional development as we have been viewing it they might include:

• What are the rules? What vision of development is driving the process? What interests are being promoted?
• Who is setting the rules? Who is challenging them? Whose values are evident in the process?
• Where are the norms expressed, formally and informally? Where is the motivation coming from? Where do these players get together?
• When did these rules begin to seem dated? When did people begin to think differently about this issue? When did these players start getting together?
• Why have these rules emerged? Why has it made sense to think differently about this issue? Why did these players get together?
• How are the rules being enforced? How have people been encouraged to think differently about this issue? How did this particular player come to prominence?

These are good questions to ask of any process of institutional development. They should certainly inform your exploration of institutional development, both as history and as intervention. But they are by no means the only questions. I hope you are specifying your own. And I am about to add some more, related to other themes of institutional development which have been discernible in my exploration so far.

4.2 Key concepts of institutional development

Each of the passages that I have used to introduce the three ways of seeing institutions (as rules and norms, as shared meanings and values and as ‘big players’) also reveals other concepts needed to interrogate institutional development. In the next three sections we will look at these more closely.

Compliance and shared experience

Brett conceptualised institutions as sets of rules and norms. But if you look more closely at the following passage, you will see that he is saying other things about institutions:

I would highlight two concepts that emerge here:

• compliance: individuals and organisations are obliged to comply with the rules, through incentives and/or sanctions
• shared experience: institutions bring people and organisations together, ‘solving the problems of collective action’ (Brett, 2000, p. 18).

You can be disciplined, and ask the five Ws and H questions of each of these concepts. Take, for example, compliance:

• Who are the enforcers?
• What are the incentives/sanctions?
• Where do the incentives/sanctions come from?
• When does it become necessary to apply sanctions?
• Why are sanctions required?
• How are the sanctions enforced?

I am not going to devise a set of five Ws and H questions for all the concepts I am identifying here! I would encourage you, though, to do what I have just done, and devise your own questions for at least one of these concepts.

Individual agency and institutional contradiction

Engberg-Pedersen is as generous as Brett with his insights into the qualities of institutions and the nature of institutional development. Two aspects of his theoretical approach are of particular significance:

• Individual agency: Engberg-Pedersen places particular value on an individual’s critical engagement with elements of institutions that frame her or his behaviour. Quite apart from the general significance of this in institutional development, it has an important message with respect to professional behaviour and self-understanding. ‘Reflecting on the institutional context’ and choosing ‘action which confronts or bypasses a specific institutional element’ brings about change both socially and within the individual. The BancoSol story provides an example of one such action.
• Institutional contradictions: This is the title of Engberg-Pedersen’s article. He identifies something that will, if you are involved in any process of development, strike you as a critical issue in the process: the encounter between different and differing ‘symbolic orders’, most obviously the symbolic orders of, on the one hand, the ‘interveners’, and, on the other, the ‘beneficiaries’. This is an encounter in which the new symbolic order contradicts the old, with the interveners in effect saying to the beneficiaries, ‘You’ve got it wrong’. The beneficiaries, in return, think that the interveners must have got it wrong.

Relationships and power

What, finally, about the third view of institutions? Consider the opening two sentences of Hulme’s picture of the ‘institutional landscape for attacking global poverty’:

Two concepts are prominent here:

• Relationships: Hulme may be talking of the ‘big players’, but they are not players who play – or can play – on their own. Hulme uses a number of terms to spell out the reality that institutional development depends on relationships between agencies, its quality and qualities shaped by the dynamics of the relationships.
• Power: In my original look at Hulme’s picture, I suggested that, ‘Perhaps most strikingly, the picture is one of power plays and politics’. Power drives the action and that institutional development can be seen most fruitfully as the outcome of power struggles.

I might have selected many other concepts from each of the passages I have looked at. But I want to turn finally to a rather different kind of concept, that I can best illustrate with reference to the story of BancoSol: the concept of ‘levels of action’.

4.3 Levels of action

In the BancoSol story, you can see institutional development taking place at a number of levels. It is useful to distinguish between these levels, though it must be recognised that what is happening at one level is never in real life separate from what is happening at the others.

One conventional way of describing these different levels is to identify ‘macro’, ‘meso’ and ‘micro’ levels. I must immediately say that these terms can mean different things in different contexts. But I can suggest what might be a helpful way of understanding them by looking through the two lenses I identified for looking at institutional development: institutional development as history; and institutional development as intervention. Through these lenses:

Macro level:

• institutional development as history: broad structural change involving, for example, the way the international financial system works
• institutional development as intervention: activities that involve a broad range of ‘big players’ and are aimed at changing the wider social and economic structure; policy change at national and global level.

Meso level:

• institutional development as history: changing patterns of interaction between organisations and institutions
• institutional development as intervention: agencies involved in development action building relationships with each other in order to achieve common goals.

Micro level:

• institutional development as history: local change necessitated by broad structural change
• institutional development as intervention: change undertaken by local organisations that is designed to promote new norms governing their relationships.

Table 1 shows what this might look like in the BancoSol story:

4.4 Identifying a conceptual framework

I have produced what is becoming a long list of concepts that are important in helping us to understand institutions and institutional development:

• rules and norms
• meanings and values
• big players
• compliance
• shared experience
• individual agency
• institutional contradictions
• relationships
• power
• levels of action: macro, meso, micro.

I want to draw this course’s studies to a close by suggesting you can treat this set of concepts – or, indeed, any other set you might have created – as a conceptual framework. By ‘conceptual framework’ I mean that these concepts can be connected with each other, enabling you to look at institutions and institutional development in a disciplined and powerful fashion.

I will illustrate what I mean by using these concepts to analyse a particular institutional landscape that I’ve needed to understand in my own work.

4.5 Analysing an institutional landscape

You may have noticed that I’ve used the term ‘institutional landscape’ at various points without explaining what I mean by the term. You may also have noted that it features in our learning outcomes. So what do I mean by it? And why is it important?

I am using the term simply to refer to the context in which a development action is to take place, but with attention focused on those aspects of the context (landscape) that might be considered institutional. So, in exploring an institutional landscape I would be looking, for example, for the ‘rules of the game’ that are being followed – the rules that I might want either to reinforce or to replace. By making use of the whole range of concepts in a conceptual framework I can create quite a complex picture, one that – all else being equal – I can use to inform the planning of the development action.

It is perhaps rarely – too rarely – that we undertake this kind of analysis in anything like a systematic fashion. But here, in Box 5, by way of an example, is an analysis of the institutional landscape that I might have constructed when in the first half of the 1990s I joined a team set up in Sheffield (a city in the north of England) to support civil society organisations increasingly expected to work in partnership with public sector agencies in the development and ‘delivery’ of social and healthcare services:

The case study in Box 5 is only a sketch, and one with which not all my colleagues would agree – a pointer to the fact that even with the discipline of a conceptual framework, judgements and analyses can differ. I hope though, that it gives you some sense both of what an analysis of the institutional landscape might look like and of the way in which a conceptual framework can be used.

4.6 Interrogating a conceptual framework

I want to suggest one other way in which a conceptual framework can be used.

Earlier, I suggested you might create a spray diagram which held together the different concepts I’ve presented you with relating to institutions and institutional development. I also suggested you might like to ask questions related to the concepts.

I now want to put those two suggestions together.

Activity 7 Using a diagram to interrogate the landscape

Timing: You should spend no more than 1 hour on this activity

Create a spray diagram – or, better, spray diagrams – that are built around the concepts and annotated with questions. Here in Figure 1 is an example of what I mean.

Spray Diagrams

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This spray diagram links the three ways of seeing institutions: as rules and norms, as meanings and values, and as big players. It raises questions linked to each of them:

• Rules, norms: Who’s breaking them? Behaviour changing?
• Meanings, values: Sense to beneficiaries? Good/bad policy?
• Big players: Connections? What power?

Spray Diagrams

Table 2 presents some ideas to think about coming from the diagram.

Figure 1 Spray diagram around a conceptual framework

Table 2 Questions around a conceptual framework

rules	What’s wrong with the existing rules? Who’s breaking them? And why?
norms	How has behaviour been changing?
meanings	What sense will this change make to those supposed to benefit from it? Why are people objecting to the situation?
values	What’s bad about this policy? In whose eyes?
big players	What power do they have? How do they relate to each other?

My diagram is abstract, relating to no particular development action. I do think the questions are good, despite this. I suspect your diagram will be better if drawn with a specific situation or development action in mind.

Now draw your own diagrams.

Conclusion

In this free course, I have aimed to help you develop your understanding of institutions and institutional development by:

• identifying key concepts with which you can build up your understanding of institutions
• showing how these concepts can be formed into a conceptual framework that enables you to analyse institutional landscapes and institutional development
• suggesting that you can and should develop your own conceptual framework.

I have also presented you with a ‘story’ of institutional development. I trust this has shown that institutional development is a fundamental aspect of development and development management, in that (in this particular case) it is about creating new rules and norms and values through which people’s well-being can be enhanced.

I hope you have found the concepts I have introduced helpful in terms of developing your understanding of the institutions and institutional development which are important in your life and work.

References

Acknowledgements

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated in the acknowledgements section, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

Course image: jbdodane in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Licence.

The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this course:

Activity 3: Otero, P., (1997) Annex 1 ‘An overview of BancoSol’, Annex 2 ‘Goals and objectives of microenterprise lending institutions and lending methodologies’, Annex 3 ‘Institutional transformation’, Annex 4 ‘Controlling fraud’, Presentation by Pancho Otero to Workshop in Zimbabwe, USAID Conference Report, January, pp. 52–64.

Activity 4: extract from: Engberg-Pedersen, L. (1997) ‘Institutional contradictions in rural development’, European Journal of Development Research, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 183–4 and 188-9.

Activity 5: extract from: Hulme, D. (2010) Global Poverty: How Global Governance is Failing the Poor, (pp 81-82) Oxford, Routledge.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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