Five years. 780 articles. One argument. A note of gratitude and a statement of what this project has meant to the person who built it.
The Note
This blog began on March 22, 2021, as an attempt to build a public record of institutional analysis that was both accessible and rigorous — analysis that would be useful to the practitioner, the policy analyst, the civic organiser, and the engaged citizen who wanted to understand not just what was happening in the institutions around them but why, and what could be done about it. Five years and 780 articles later, the attempt has produced a body of analysis that has exceeded what I imagined it would at the beginning, confirmed the premise I started with, and generated the specific analytical framework that the accumulated work has built.
Building this project across five years — across the move from the United States to Kenya, the long-distance marriage, the CR-1 process, the return to Nairobi, and all the life that the institutional systems this blog has analysed were simultaneously shaping — has been one of the most sustained intellectual commitments I have made. It has been in service of a claim that I believe more strongly now than I did when I started: that understanding institutions analytically is one of the most important things that the people who care about the quality of the world they are living in can do, and that the specific work of making institutions more accountable, more capable, and more genuinely responsive to the populations they are supposed to serve is the governance work that matters most. The blog has been my contribution to that claim. The work it calls for is the contribution that I hope the people who read it will make to the world we share.
March 2021 to March 2026. The years passed. The work was done. The argument stands. What comes next is the work the argument calls for — in the specific institutions, with the specific people, on the specific governance challenges that determine whether the social contract of the next generation is better or worse than the one we inherited. That work does not end here. This is where it gets named.
Discussion