The institutional analyst who believes that institutional improvement is possible in the face of the structural evidence for its difficulty is exercising a kind of faith. This is the argument for that faith.
The Evidence for Faith
The structural analysis of institutional failure is, taken on its own terms, a sobering body of evidence. The accountability gaps that enable institutional failure are structural and persistent. The political economy that protects failing institutional arrangements is powerful and well-organised. The reform conditions that allow institutional improvement rarely align simultaneously and do not align for long. And the history of institutional reform is the history of reforms that were harder to achieve, took longer to produce results, and were more vulnerable to reversal than the reformers who pursued them anticipated. Against this evidence, the belief that institutional improvement is possible — that the specific governance investments, the specific accountability mechanisms, and the specific coalition-building efforts that the structural analysis identifies as necessary can produce the institutional improvements it identifies as possible — requires a form of faith that the structural analysis alone does not provide.
The argument for that faith is the historical record of the institutional improvements that were achieved against the structural conditions that made them difficult: the civil rights legislation that was achieved against a century of structural resistance, the social insurance programmes that were built against the political economy that opposed them, the democratic transitions that succeeded against the authoritarian pressures that were supposed to prevent them, and the specific institutional reforms in specific contexts that are less famous but no less real. These improvements were not inevitable — the structural conditions made them difficult. They were achieved by specific people who chose to pursue them against the evidence that the structure provided for not trying. That choice is what the practitioner's faith consists of.
The practitioner's faith is the belief that the institutional improvement the structural analysis identifies as necessary and possible is achievable by the specific people doing the specific work in the specific context — against the structural evidence for its difficulty and in the presence of the historical record of improvements that were achieved anyway. That faith is not irrational. It is the epistemic precondition for the work that makes institutional improvement real.
Discussion