Some institutional changes require a crisis to become politically possible. Understanding this does not mean welcoming crises — it means using them when they arrive.
Crisis-Dependent Change
Some institutional changes are structurally impossible in stable conditions because the actors who would need to accept the change have strong interests in the current arrangement and sufficient institutional standing to block it. The change is recognised as necessary by most informed actors, the analysis supporting it is not seriously contested, and the resistance to it is frankly about protecting interests rather than about substantive disagreement about the analysis. But the resistance is effective, because the institutional standing of the resisters is sufficient to prevent the change from completing the institutional approval process in which they participate.
Crisis changes the calculus for the resistant actors. The crisis demonstrates the cost of the current arrangement in ways that abstract analysis could not. It creates urgency that shortens the approval process. And it shifts the political dynamics — the resistant actors' interests in the current arrangement are now less visible than their responsibility for the crisis it has contributed to, which reduces their effective institutional standing for the duration of the crisis response. The change that was politically impossible before the crisis becomes politically feasible during it, not because the merits changed but because the political environment did.
The Ethical Dimension
The observation that some changes require a crisis to become possible raises an ethical question: is it appropriate to accelerate the arrival of a crisis in order to make a necessary change possible? The answer is almost always no — the harm that crises produce is real and falls on people who have not consented to bear it for the benefit of institutional changes that may not materialise or that may not address the crisis's underlying causes. What is appropriate is to prepare the change in advance of the crisis — to have the analysis done, the proposals developed, and the coalition built, so that when the crisis arrives, the change can move quickly in the window the crisis creates, rather than being improvised under time pressure in ways that produce poorly-designed outcomes.
Some changes cannot happen without a crisis. The analyst who recognises this has no obligation to create crises — but has a professional obligation to prepare the changes so that when the crisis arrives, the window it creates is used to produce the change rather than wasted on improvisation.
Discussion