The blog ends. The institutional problems it has documented do not. What comes after institutional analysis is institutional action.
The Transition
The end of this blog is not the end of the analysis it has been building. The framework that five years of institutional analysis has produced is a tool that continues to apply to the institutional problems that continue to develop — the new platforms requiring governance, the new climate institutions being built inadequately, the new political movements testing institutional resilience, and the specific institutions in specific communities whose failure or improvement will determine the quality of life of the specific people who depend on them. The framework is more useful after five years of development than it was when the first article was published. Its continued application is what justifies the investment in building it.
What comes after institutional analysis — what follows the description of how institutions work and why they fail — is the harder and more consequential work: the building of the coalitions, the designing of the accountability mechanisms, the construction of the governance frameworks, and the sustained engagement with specific institutions in specific communities that turns the analytical framework into the institutional improvement that the analysis has identified as necessary and possible. The blog has been an argument. What the argument is for — what it is trying to produce in the people who have read it — is not agreement with the analysis but engagement with the institutional world that the analysis describes. The work that the argument calls for is the work that comes after the argument ends.
Analysis serves action. The five years of institutional analysis this blog has built is in service of the institutional engagement that comes after the analysis — the specific work of building, reforming, and holding accountable the specific institutions that determine whether the social contract the analysis has been describing is honoured or broken. That work does not end when the blog does.
Discussion