A condensed version of the institutional analysis framework for practical application.
The Questions
The institutional analysis framework that this blog has developed over five years can be condensed into five questions that, applied consistently, reveal the structural conditions that determine whether an institution serves its stated purpose or something else. Question one: what is the institution actually optimising for? Not what it claims to optimise for, but what the pattern of its decisions, its resource allocations, and its accountability responses reveals that it is actually optimising for. Question two: who bears the cost when the institution fails? The distribution of failure costs across populations — concentrated in the most vulnerable, dispersed across the population as a whole, or borne by the institution itself — reveals whose interests the institution is designed to protect.
Question three: what would it take to improve this institution? Not the aspirational answer — the answer that involves unlimited resources and perfect political will — but the realistic answer that identifies the specific structural conditions that constrain institutional performance and the specific changes that would address those conditions. Question four: who has the power to make those changes, and what would it take to produce that power? The governance question that identifies the specific actors whose decisions determine whether institutional improvement is possible and the specific political conditions under which they would make those decisions. Question five: what would success look like, and how would it be measured? The accountability question that identifies what institutional performance means for the populations the institution is supposed to serve, in terms that are measurable enough to allow the institution's performance to be evaluated honestly.
The five questions are: what is the institution optimising for, who bears the cost when it fails, what would genuine improvement require, who has the power to produce that improvement, and what would success look like? Answering them honestly about any specific institution is the institutional analysis that the governance of that institution requires.
Discussion