New research explores what the regulatory state of the South will look like in the coming decade
Thu 29 October 2020
Sustainable Development Goal 16 asks the international community to build “strong institutions” around the world. As a result, institutional reform is high on the global agenda, with hopes that it will support peace and justice, and fears that it will prove ineffective, oppressive, and imperialistic.
In a new article, “Reflexive institutional reform and the politics of the regulatory state of the south” (Regulation and Governance, 2020), Dr Deval Desai asks what institutional reforms look like today in practice – and whether they are likely to meet our hopes or realise our fears. Based on Dr Desai’s decade of experience working in and researching institutional reform, he takes stock of contemporary practices and their historical trajectory, to chart a possible pathway for the decade ahead.
The paper contributes to our understanding of institutional reform on three levels – empirical, analytical, and theoretical. Empirically, it identifies and historicises a new type of institutional reform, which it terms “reflexive institutional reform”. This type of reform doesn’t focus on developing and implementing models of what a good institution or law looks like, as has been commonplace until recently. Instead, it identifies and responds to people’s political values about how they should be governed. Analytically, it identifies the emergence of an infrastructure that has enabled development actors to put this new type of reform into practice. This is composed of massive data-gathering of people’s political and social values; adaptive institutional design processes; and large multi-stakeholder platforms. Theoretically, it explores the political structures embedded in this infrastructure to sketch some of their consequences for political participation in, and state capacity for, institutional reforms. In doing so, it sets out a research agenda to both support and critique the implementation of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals over the next decade.