The person who has lived and worked in two institutional landscapes sees both more clearly than the person who has lived in only one.
The Comparative Lens
The experience of living and working in two substantially different institutional environments — the United States and Kenya, in my case — produces a comparative lens that is the most practically valuable analytical tool the institutional analyst can have. Each institutional environment is most clearly visible when it is compared to something significantly different: the American healthcare system's cost structure is most visible to the person who has experienced a single-payer system; the Kenyan informal economy's institutional innovation is most visible to the person who has experienced the constraints of a fully formalised economy; and the specific features of each country's democratic institutions — their strengths and their vulnerabilities — are most visible to the person who has experienced democracy operating under different institutional conditions.
The two-country institutional map is also the map of institutional possibility: the person who has seen institutional problems solved differently in a different context knows that the current institutional arrangement is a choice rather than a necessity, and that the specific features of the current arrangement that produce the current outcomes are not inherent to the function the institution performs but are contingent on the specific governance choices that produced the current arrangement. This knowledge — that institutional arrangements are choices rather than inevitabilities — is the epistemic foundation of institutional reform: the belief that things could be different is the prerequisite for the work of making them different.
The two-country institutional map produces the comparative perspective that makes both landscapes more visible. What each country's institutions take for granted is visible from the vantage point of the other country's different approach to the same governance challenge. That visibility is the most practically valuable form of institutional knowledge available — and it is the specific analytical contribution that the diaspora experience uniquely provides.
Discussion