Institutional mandates expand through the same logic that produces mission drift — but the expansion of formal authority creates different and more serious problems than drift alone.
How Mandates Expand
Institutional mandates expand through several mechanisms that each appear individually justifiable. Mission adjacency: the institution encounters a problem that its existing mandate does not address but that is close enough to the mandate to be argued as within its scope. Capacity offering: the institution has developed capabilities in the course of executing its core mandate that are applicable to adjacent problems, and it offers those capabilities in response to requests from actors who face the adjacent problems. And political accommodation: the institution's mandate is expanded by the political processes that govern it, in response to demands from constituencies that want the institution to address problems it was not created to address, as a more politically feasible alternative to creating a new institution or significantly expanding existing ones.
Each of these mechanisms is individually understandable and often produces genuine value. The problem is aggregate: the institution whose mandate has been expanded through each of these mechanisms multiple times over years may be doing things that are sufficiently different from its founding purpose that the coherence of its institutional design — the organisational structure, the personnel selection, the performance measurement — is no longer adequate for everything it has become responsible for.
The Coherence Cost
The coherence cost of mandate expansion is the reduction in institutional effectiveness that comes from trying to do too many different things with an institutional design optimised for fewer, more coherent activities. The institution that was designed to do three things effectively and has been given responsibility for seven faces the choice between doing all seven adequately and some subset excellently. In most institutional contexts, the political economy favours adequate performance across all mandated activities over excellent performance in a subset — which means mandate expansion systematically produces institutional mediocrity as its equilibrium outcome.
Every mandate expansion is an argument about scope. The institution that wins every argument about scope eventually wins its way into incoherence — doing too many different things to do any of them well, with an institutional design that was optimised for a much smaller and more coherent set of responsibilities.
Discussion