Bridging political economy analysis and critical institutionalism: an approach to help analyse institutional change for rural water services

Abstract

This paper argues that approaches to understanding local institutions for natural resource management based on "critical institutionalism" (Cleaver 2012), which emphasises the importance of improvisation and adaptation across different scales, can be placed within broader political economy analysis frameworks for assessing challenges in public services delivery from national to local levels. The paper uses such an extended political economy analysis approach to understand the role of the international NGO WaterAid and its partners in Mali in relation to institutions for financing rural water services, drawing on collaborative research undertaken in 2010 and 2011. The case study shows that WaterAid's approach can be understood through elements of both mainstream and critical institutionalist thinking. At local government level, WaterAid primarily promotes formal institutional arrangements, which exhibit the challenge of "reforms as signals" (Andrews 2013), where institutional reforms appear to happen but lack the intended function. However, the work of WaterAid's partners at community level supports processes of "institutional bricolage" through which they try to gradually work with local actors to find ways of 'best fit' for financing rural water services which adapt existing local practices into new arrangements.

Furthering critical institutionalism

“…It is at these interfaces that much bricolage work is done to navigate between different interests, to blend and smooth out some of the discrepancies between regulation and practice. Here we can see the blending of logics, the leakage of meaning, the exercise of authoritative power, as well as the creative exercise of agency, the generation of practical governance and the stubborn persistence of inequities (Funder and Marani 2015;Jones 2015;Marin and Bjorkland 2015).…”

“…It can be difficult to capture the dynamic nature of institutional evolution and functioning without in-depth longitudinal studies. Papers in this volume show the need for understanding the varying logics and intensity of different strands of governance arrangements operating concurrently (Ingram et al 2015;Marin and Bjorkland 2015) and the need to study different modes of governance using one framework (Jones 2015).…”

“…There is a growing concern in development related literature with identifying 'arrangements that work' -conceptualised as the practical hybrid mechanisms that people create to get a job done and ensure meaning and social fit (Booth 2012;De Herdt 2013;Jones 2015). In common with many 'wicked problems', resource management issues and the fairness of institutional arrangements depends on the viewpoint of the person perceiving them (Venot 2011).…”

“…2 We loosely combine such authors under the umbrella label of critical institutionalism, though they would not necessarily recognize or use that label themselves. delivery (Olivier de Sardan 2008;Hagmann and Péclard 2010;Jones 2015); the efficacy of community based approaches to development (Dill 2010); and the nature of property and access (Sikor and Lund 2009). These intersecting literatures offer valuable insights into the formation of institutional norms through everyday practices (Arts et al 2013), and through the authoritative allocation of resources in 'twilight' institutional zones (Lund 2006).…”

Collective management of natural resources in a vulnerable environment: case studies from coastal Bangladesh

“…On the other hand, from a CI perspective, Cleaver and de Koning (2015: 12) ask ,"in embracing plurality and complexity, how can we produce analyses of complex and dynamic institutional processes which are broadly legible to policy and public decision making?" Thus drawing eclectically on the different approaches could both enrich our understanding of the trajectories in resource governance and provide analyses that are more constructive and transformational (Jones 2015;Ingram et al 2015;Marin and Bjorkland 2015;Funder and Marani 2015;Verzijl and Dominguez 2015).…”