Process Of Institutional Development Research Articles

The Tous dam disaster of 1982 and the origins of integrated flood risk management in Spain

The failure of the Tous dam in 1982 caused one of the most important socio-natural disasters in Spain during the twentieth century. That event triggered a paradigm change in the way disaster risks were perceived and managed, not only locally, but also at multiple levels of governance. Fifteen interviews with relevant stakeholders, content analysis of scientific literature, and review of historical and media accounts indicate that the collapse of the Tous dam had the two major effects. First, it prompted a process of institutional development, which led to the growth, and increase in complexity of the organizations involved both in vertical and horizontal communication of disaster risk reduction. Second, actions taken and experiences gained in dealing with disaster risk reduction in the Tous area were used as a benchmark to develop new strategies, as well as new mechanisms for communication and planning in other territories and other risk domains in Spain. This paper also identified the three main stages in the evolution of disaster risk reduction planning in the area: (1) After the collapse of the Tous dam, disaster risk reduction strategies in Spain focused on improving preparedness in order to reduce short-term risks. (2) Disaster management in the 1990s was strongly influenced by international initiatives, which emphasized the contextualization of risk and the importance in long-term disaster risk reduction measures such as land-use planning. (3) The European Water Framework Directive (2000) and, more recently, the Floods Directive (2007) are exerting a strong influence on the development of a new Spanish flood policy that focuses on preventive measures. However, this process is far from complete and many issues still remain unresolved: dealing with different domains of risk action, integrating concepts of ecological resilience and climate change, and promoting public awareness and effective participation.

De "Proculi damnatione": Próculo de Marsella y la construcción de la Iglesia gala a principios del siglo V

El presente artículo se centra en el largo obispado de Próculo deMarsella (ca. 381-428) con el fin de analizar este momento clave en el proceso consolidación de la estructura institucional de la Iglesia gala.Asimismo, este trabajo trata de poner en práctica una metodología que permita analizar procesos complejos de desarrollo institucional.

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Class, Power, and Patronage: Landowners and Politics in Punjab

In the century following their conquest of the province, the British in Punjab erected an administrative apparatus that, like those of precolonial regimes, relied heavily upon the support of the province's landed class. The relationship between the landed class and the colonial state was one of mutual benefit, with the latter using the former to ensure the maintenance of order and collection of revenue in exchange for state patronage. In this paper, it is argued that this administrative framework gave rise to a path-dependent process of institutional development in Punjab, allowing for the different fractions of the province's landowning class to increasingly entrench themselves within the political order in the postcolonial epoch. This paper outlines the mechanisms underlying this process of institutional development, focusing, in particular, on the strategies adopted by the landowning class to reproduce its power. This paper also considers the potentialities for institutional change in Punjab, allowing for the creation of a more democratic and participatory politics in the province.

Open Source Political Community Development: A Five-Stage Adoption Process

ABSTRACT This article considers the emergence of large-scale “commons-based peer production” projects such as Wikipedia.org from an institutional development perspective. The argument it makes is threefold. First, that that the lowered transaction costs and information abundance found online transform a subset of public goods problems, essentially replacing free-ridership with mass coordination as the central challenge. Second, that the boundaries of this subset are defined by a “power-law topology” that leads to the emergence of online hub spaces and serves to resolve search problems endemic to the anti-geographic online landscape. These boundary conditions limit the overall impact of commons-based peer production for the political space. Third, that all such hubs move through a common five-stage institutional development process, directly related to standard models of the diffusion of innovation. Identification of the institutional development process behind Wikipedia leads in turn to the stipulation of seven hypotheses: the “Field of Dreams” fallacy, the “Interest Horizons” thesis, “Political Strategy Is Not Like Computer Code,” the “Location-based Wave” thesis, “Power Law Fragility Under Moore's Law,” the “Punctuated Equilibrium” thesis, and “Code-Forking the Public Sphere.” Each thesis holds direct implications for the potential and limitations of “open source” applications in the political arena.

Institutional Development as a Challenge to Democratic Sustenance in Nigeria

Certain pre-conditions that can broadly be classified as economic, social and political have been regarded as essential for sustaining democracy. Among these, the political factor in terms of institutional development may be regarded as vital, for these institutions serve as viable channels for ventilating people's expectations and their dissatisfaction through non-violent means. Besides, they also serve as effective means to establish political accountability. However, more than the mere presence of the political institutions that help democratic sustenance, what matters is the fact that they must be nursed and developed to a level that other narrow, exclusivist ties like ethnic loyalties become less important. In other words, within the process of institutional development, there should be a balanced development of these institutions so that no one particular institution becomes powerful at the expense of other institutions. The experience of Nigeria highlights the troubled times the political parties, judiciary, media and other institutions have gone through as a consequence of military takeovers during much of the country's Independence. Faced with eroded institutions, Nigeria could not unfortunately grapple with the emergent challenges in the social or economic spheres.

Dartmouth, Sir Mansfield Cumming and the origins of the British intelligence community

This article uses original archive material to trace the connection between two processes of institutional development that was to result in the British intelligence Community becoming an integral part of government. The first process was the development in the latter part of the nineteenth century of a scheme of education and training for naval cadets at Dartmouth. The importance of this scheme is that it gives, through the Records of Progress and Conduct, a unique insight into the qualities that the first two heads of Britain's foreign intelligence service, and the first head of Britain's signals intelligence unit brought to their respective posts. This article argues that there are a number of timeless and vital competencies which cadets Smith, Sinclair and Hall displayed, albeit in embryonic form, that were critical, later on, in propelling their respective organizations to the centre of government. This is the second process of institutionalization. It is a position that they still occupy today.

Reassessing Prospects for the Open Access Movement

Open access may well be a turning point for the scholarly communication system, but not on the basis claimed by its advocates. As opposed to the claim that open access means a less costly system, in reality it entails redundant expenditures and inflationary pressures. The true significance of open access, involving processes of institutional development of the system, has not entered into the public debate. Such processes are chiefly twofold: the adjustment of the open-access movement to the different needs and cultures of the various stakeholder groups, and the advent of a more complex system architecture that facilitates research productivity and scholarly innovation.

CONFLICTS IN INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: IMPLICATIONS FOR JOINT FOREST MANAGEMENT

ABSTRACT Against the back drop of present National Forest Policy of India (1988), local level organisations have been developed in most parts of the country for effective forest management. The development of these organisations has led to a number of conflicts. The dynamics and management of conflicts in 32 local level organisations of forest management have been analyzed. In more than three quarters of the committees studied, conflicts were found, especially relating to access in control over forest resources, their management and the institutional functioning of the Forest Department. Nearly half of the conflicts remained unresolved. The emergence of conflict is an inevitable part of the institutional development process. Results are discussed in the light of theories of group development and their implications for Joint Forest Management are highlighted. The conclusion is drawn that conflicts can play an important role in facilitating institutional learning and in making JFM institutions more effective.

Institutions and Firms in Transition Economies

Prepared for the Handbook Of New Institutional Economics, this chapter focuses on how the NIE has been used to understand transition and how the experience of transition can help inform the NIE. It first shows that the NIE, as an analytical tool, hardly played any role at all in early transition, but that strategies of transition might have been very different had they embodied the lessons of the NIE. Institutional lacunae are now presumed to underlie the deep recessions in the first post-communist years. Subsequently, however, institutional construction has been quick. This chapter presents evidence on the speed of construction and on variations across different types of institutions. It also examines the reactions of firms to the new institutions. Firm adjustment is slower than institutional construction. The contrast between law's use in transactions and problems in corporate governance suggests that complementarities between institutions are important and that new institutions cannot quickly negate the effects of past privatization policies. These conclusions reverberate with the process of Chinese reforms, which relied on transitional institutions and which had characteristics that would seem familiar to a practitioner of the NIE. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the lessons from transition for the NIE. The destruction of even very poor institutions can be costly. Institutional construction can proceed very quickly when there is consensus on change and the process of institutional development is supply driven. At the same time, increases in national income can lag institutional development, if firms are slow to react, which will especially be the case if the new institutions are far removed from existing ones, as is likely when changes are supply driven.At present, there is no generally accepted accounting of the institutional strengths and weaknesses of the transition economies. The first goal of the paper is to fill this gap by assessing current levels of institutional development. The second is to examine which types of institutional mechanisms make relatively strong contributions. Extensive empirical evidence shows that institutional quality in transition countries is roughly as expected given per capita incomes. Institutions are improving continuously. Given prevailing assumptions that the institutional situation is dismal, the developments giving rise to this surprising finding must be investigated more fully. This investigation begins by cataloging the mechanisms that could have improved institutional indexes. Then, evidence is examined on the relative strengths of each of these mechanisms. Formal institutions have contributed more than informal ones. The largest contributions have come from formal institutions separate from the state administrative structure. Political institutions, legal systems, and independent governmental agencies have been important.

A Political Economy Approach to the Neoclassical Model of Transition

The neoclassical model of transition from a centrally‐administered socialist economic system to a market‐based economic system was implemented in Russia and Eastern Europe. The neoclassical process took the form of either shock therapy or gradualism. However, each approach actually involved a combination of shock therapy and gradualist policies, making the distinction between the two approaches unfounded. In addition, both approaches suffered by the innate inadequacies of neoclassical economic analysis as being politically/institutionally naked. Both shock therapy supporters and gradualist neoclassical economists did not provide a specific process of institutional development, favouring a gradual market‐driven institutional outcome. With regard to the political structure, democracy was inconsistent with shock therapy, while active state intervention during transition was inconsistent with the ultimate goal of the gradualist neoclassical economists of competitive capitalism.

An Evolutionary Theory of Collective Action: Schumpeterian Entrepreneurship for the Common Good

This paper presents the foundations of a dynamictheory of collective action. Firstly, the role of public entrepreneursin processes of institutional development is characterized. Secondly,the protagonists of social change are analyzed in regard to theirmotivation, strategic options, levels of action, and specificcapabilities. A new perspective on successful collective actionis opened up.

Divergent Discourses of Learning Difficulty

AbstractIt is argued that the influence of the functionalist tradition of organisation theory can be detected in various areas of contemporary educational research, including research concerned with the development of mainstream provision for pupils with learning difficulties, in the emphasis placed upon the need for consensus among school staff over shared values and goals. Evidence is then presented and discussed from a case study of an English secondary school, where a process of institutional development was under way aimed at enhancing provision for pupils with learning difficulties. Analysis of the data shows that two divergent discourses of learning difficulty could be identified in use in the school, articulated by different constituencies of staff. These are termed, respectively, the discourse of curriculum presentation and the discourse of pupil ability. A model of the structure of the discourses is proposed, identifying six dimensions along which they diverge. The relations obtaining between the discourse constituencies are analysed. On the basis of this analysis, it is argued that previous research in the field of school improvement and inclusion may have exaggerated the need for consensus among teaching staff. Instead, it is argued that the process of dialogue between the constituencies associated with divergent pedagogical discourses can act as an important motor in creating a dynamic of development within the school.

An institutional development process in community based coastal resource management: building the capacity and opportunity for community based co-management in a small-scale fisheries community

The term Community Based Coastal Resource Management (CB-CRM) is used to describe localized co-management systems wherein small-scale fisherfolk take up a dominant role in fisheries management. In this paper, a description is given of the development process for the establishment of such a community based co-management system, as it gradually evolved in the course of a CB-CRM project. The development process of a municipal federation of small-scale fisherfolk organizations in a semi-urban area in the Philippines is described and analyzed in five phases. It is concluded that progress in this CB-CRM project depended largely on local institutional development processes in the community. Discussed is how the implementation of specific strategies in the project may have contributed to the institutional development of the federation. Finally, some suggestions for improved CB-CRM project development in general are given.

Green Dots, Pink Hearts: Displacing Politics from the Malaysian Rain Forest

Recent years have witnessed the progressive envelopment of environmental politics within institutions for local, national, and global environmental governance. Such institutions inscribe particular forms of discourse, simultaneously creating certain possibilities and precluding others, privileging certain actors and marginalizing others. Apparently designed to ameliorate environmental destruction, these institutions may in fact obstruct meaningful change through endless negotiation, legalistic evasion, and compromise among “stakeholders.” More importantly, however, they insinuate and naturalize a discourse that excludes moral or political imperatives in favor of indifferent bureaucratic and technoscientific forms of institutionally created and validated intervention. Drawing on Rappaport's insights about “the subordination of the fundamental to the contingent and instrumental” (in “The Anthropology of Trouble”), I examine this process of institutional development with reference to an international rain forest campaign that focused on Sarawak, East Malaysia, from the late‐1980s to the mid‐1990s, [environmentalism, institutionalization, governmentality, rain forest politics, Sarawak (Malaysia)]

NGOs and the Development of Local Institutions: a Ugandan Case-Study

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have a long history of promoting grass-roots membership organisations, but have made few attempts to document this experience in ways that are accessible to external audiences. Academic analysis has partially filled this gap by identifying the characteristics of strong organisations, but has had relatively little to say about how they develop, or the specific rôle which NGOs might play in helping them to emerge. This issue has recently assumed greater importance in the light both of donor wishes to strengthen civil society, and the more specific concerns of NGOs to scale-up their activities by helping the organisations with which they work to become more self-sufficient.This article is drawn from a wider study which explores the strategies employed by NGOs in promoting membership organisations, and asks whether this can be done in ways which are both broadly equitable and reasonably cost-effective. It describes a programme mounted by the pan-African NGO consortium known as ACORD (Agency for Co-operation and Research in Development) to initiate a process of institutional development in the Nebbi District of Uganda. The case is of particular interest as an example of an attempt to introduce new institutions into a highly volatile environment, and provides a basis for arriving at a number of more general propositions about good practice.

Water management networks in Hungary: Network development in a period of transition

In the countries of Central Europe the dynamics of network change are more marked than in most countries of Western Europe. The discontinuities between traditional patterns of water management and the new political and economic conditions that are presently emerging are quite dramatic. An examination of the way in which post‐communist developments are modifying the traditional system of Hungarian water management illustrates nicely the processes of institutional development and network change which are likely to be important in other countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well. Although things are in a state of flux ‐ and even though we have relatively little empirical information on actual operations — a brief description of the current arrangements for water management in Hungary provides a useful baseline from which to describe the institutional and societal context as well as the task environment out of which new patterns of water policy networks will develop. Such an analysis can suggest ways in which network relations and formal institutions interact and mutually shape one another in the daily practices through which ‘real’ policy is developed and applied. The Hungarian case makes clear how broader system changes modify the context of sectoral networks and how these become embedded in larger political and social structures. It is this set of more extensive changes that has created the need for new network relations and has, simultaneously, changed the rules and the conditions under which these will emerge. At the same time, a focus on the need actively to design and create such networks suggests the value in looking more closely at the nuts and bolts questions of how such cooperation can be brought about.

Integrated urban management: An operational model for third world city managers

Increasing concern for the process of urban management is evident in both academic circles and in multilateral agencies. From the hard-pressed Third World city manager's perspective, this is an encouraging long-term trend. However, what that city manager needs now is a robust managerial process for coping with the general problem of population growth and its consequent demands for infrastructure and services. This article seeks to present an operational model for Third World city managers. It does so with the practitioner firmly in mind. It outlines an urban and institutional development process within a strategic, managerial and performance review cycle. This model was developed for Lilongwe city council, in Malawi's young but rapidly growing capital city.

Democracy amid economic orthodoxy: Trends in developing countries

The creation of stable democracies requires a resolution of both political and class problems. The political task involves the development of appropriate institutions so that democratic norms and practices take hold in a society. Dealing with the class conundrum, in turn, demands creating acceptable political arrangements that enable democratic equality to coexist with an economic system based on class inequalities. The simultaneous pursuit of these political and class goals is a delicate task of social engineering; it has never been easy. After all, the aim of establishing democracy is to give the mass citizenry some genuine access to power, while at the same time ensuring that this access does not go so far as to threaten the smooth functioning of a class economy. The twin tasks of expanding and limiting political participation were historically facilitated by proto-democratic traditions and by the slow and steady rise of hegemonic capitalism. Traditions of compromise politics enabled excluded groups to steadily press for an expansion of the political sphere. Conversely, as markets discipline firms, rising capitalism tamed these demands by setting boundaries on the evolution of such political institutions as labour unions, parties, parliaments, bureaucracies, judiciaries and constitutions. Political institutions thus came to act as filtering mechanisms between the state and society, filtering in some mass social demands as legitimate objects of political negotiation, and filtering out other demands as beyond the legitimate scope of the polity, especially those that may hurt capitalism. While the trial and error process of institutional development was seldom smooth, and often discontinuous, all well functioning capitalist democracies came to be endowed with political institutions capable of simultaneously expressing and regulating the impact of popular demands. By contrast, developing country democracies, especially new democracies, tend to be volatile because of poorly formed political institutions. Not only do institutions take time to develop, but the state-society configurations in these countries do not readily facilitate institution building: full adult suffrage has arrived in these countries before democracy and capitalism have become widely accepted, generating an outpouring of a wide variety of demands; developed capitalism is as much a political goal of the state, as it is an evolving economic system, openly implicating the state as less than a neutral agent of public good; and, at least over the last decade, international pressures and new middle class elites within these countries have colluded to pursue highly inegalitarian economic strategies in the name of market-rationality, further contributing

Le développement institutionnel : une coopération avec et hors l’État

Institutional Development : Cooperation Within and Outside the State. To modernize the State, to be capable of accompanying it and supporting it in its new functions, in its new role, means articulating projects and accompanying the development agents and the citizens ‘outside the State’. The process of institutional development, thus, implies new intervention procedures, which require a clarification of the rules and a real mobilization of those involved in development.