Not all institutional analysis is equally valuable. The analysis worth doing is the analysis that produces the structural understanding that institutional improvement requires.
The Valuable Analysis
The institutional analysis worth doing is the analysis that produces the structural understanding that makes institutional improvement possible — the identification of the specific mechanisms producing the specific failures, the specific governance choices that would address those mechanisms, and the specific political conditions under which those governance choices could be made. This is different from the institutional commentary that describes the symptoms of institutional failure without identifying the mechanisms that produce them, the institutional advocacy that prescribes solutions without analysing the structural conditions that have prevented those solutions from being implemented, and the institutional performance measurement that tracks outputs without assessing whether those outputs are producing the outcomes the institution is supposed to produce.
The distinction between the analysis worth doing and the commentary that substitutes for it is not a distinction of intellectual sophistication — it is a distinction of analytical orientation. The analysis oriented toward understanding the mechanisms is the analysis that produces the actionable knowledge that governance improvement requires. The analysis oriented toward describing the effects without the mechanisms produces accurate description without the structural understanding that distinguishes the symptom from the condition. The former is more demanding to produce and more useful for the practitioner. The latter is more common and less useful. This blog has tried to produce the former. Whether it has succeeded is for the reader who has used the analysis to assess.
The analysis worth doing is the analysis that identifies the mechanism rather than only the symptom, the governance choice rather than only the outcome, and the structural condition rather than only the event. This orientation — toward the mechanism, the choice, and the structure — is what makes institutional analysis useful for the governance work that it is supposed to inform.
Discussion