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:
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.
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