After five years of analysing what institutions are and why they fail, the question that follows is: what institutions would you build, given the chance?
The Building Vision
The institutional analysis that this blog has developed is ultimately in service of a constructive vision — not only the description of institutional failure but the identification of what institutional improvement requires and what the institutions worth building would look like. The institutions I would build, given the chance, share a set of features that this blog has identified as the prerequisites for institutions that genuinely serve the populations they are supposed to serve: genuine accountability to those populations rather than nominal accountability to the formal overseers; incentive structures aligned with the institutional purpose rather than with the institutional survival; transparency about performance that allows the populations depending on the institution to assess it honestly; and the adaptive governance that allows the institution to learn and improve rather than to resist the feedback that improvement requires.
In the African context that I have returned to, the specific institutions I would build are the ones whose absence most constrains the development that the demographic and resource endowments of the continent could support: the accountable local governance institutions that translate national resources into local service delivery in the communities where the people with the least institutional access live; the financial infrastructure that connects the informal economy to the productive investment that the formal financial system has not reached; and the knowledge infrastructure — the research institutions, the policy analysis capacity, the institutional memory systems — that allow African governance to be informed by the evidence about what works in African contexts rather than by the imported models that may not fit.
The institutions worth building are the ones that will be genuinely serving the people they are supposed to serve in fifty years — because they were built with the accountability, the incentive alignment, and the adaptive governance that institutional durability requires. This is the constructive answer to five years of institutional analysis: not only what is broken but what the repair would look like.
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