In broken institutional environments, the most strategic act is often not building new capability but protecting the functioning capability that already exists.
The Protection Imperative
The analytical reflex in institutional development work is oriented toward building: building new institutions, new infrastructure, new capability. This reflex is appropriate for the abundant institutional vacancies that weak institutional environments present. It is dangerously incomplete when applied without adequate attention to the functioning capability that already exists — the informal institutions, the community networks, the improvised solutions that have filled institutional gaps and that can be easily destroyed by the arrival of new interventions that ignore or undermine them.
The community health system built on trained community health workers can be undermined by the arrival of a donor-funded programme that pays community health workers at rates that pull them into the programme and away from the community system they were sustaining. The community water governance institution can be undermined by the arrival of an infrastructure project that installs new infrastructure without engaging the governance institution, creating a new resource that the governance institution has no authority over and the project has no mechanism to maintain. The informal credit institution can be undermined by the arrival of a formal microfinance programme that competes for borrowers at subsidised rates, reducing the informal institution's membership until it can no longer sustain the social capital it was built on.
The Assessment Before the Intervention
Protecting what works requires the systematic assessment of existing functioning capability before designing new interventions — the deliberate identification of the informal institutions, community networks, and improvised solutions that are sustaining outcomes in the environment to be intervened in, and the explicit design of the intervention to complement rather than compete with or undermine those existing capabilities.
In broken institutional environments, what works is rare and fragile. The intervention that destroys what works while building what might work has made things worse regardless of what its evaluation shows about its own outputs. The first responsibility of development work is not to harm the functioning capability that poor people have built for themselves.
Discussion