Swedish international development cooperation agency
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20 SupportINg the DevelopmeNt of INStItutIoNS – formAl AND INformAl ruleS – utv WorkINg pAper 2005:3 lems.
tions, rules and rules of the game will here be used interchangeably. There are formal rules, such as constitutions, laws and regulations, and informal ones – behavioural norms, codes of conduct and rou- tines. Institutions are social, as opposed to personal. They are shared among the members of the society or group within which they apply. 8 Institutions are enforced, and thus become effective in terms of actu- ally being applied and adhered to, by some sort of sanction. Institutions that are not enforced are ineffec- tive and may be considered non-existent, in terms of their influence on human behaviour and social interaction. Laws, for instance, which are not adhered to are only nominally in place. Elinor Ostrom consequently stresses the concept rules-in-use rather that rules-in-form. 9
‘consist of groups of individuals bound together by some common objectives’, and he identifies economic, political as well as social organisations. 10 Organisations may be formal or informal. Informal organisations may be illegal such as the Mafia, but may also include social networks as well as informal groupings – for example, those cutting across departmental boundaries within existing formal organisations. Rules guide human action. When actors are confronted with recurrent interaction problems, rules facili- tate their decision making and behaviour by shaping expectations about how to behave successfully in those situations, thus reducing their behavioural uncertainty. Rules thereby shape incentives for behav- iour. They codify accumulated knowledge, based on the experience of others before us about the type of behaviour that proved successful in the past – just think of routines and traditions. Rules also communi- cate values, by containing social prescriptions for behaviour – telling us what we should do. 11 Sida’s policy and methodological guidelines ‘Perspectives on Poverty’ and ‘Sida at Work’ may serve as examples. 12 These are (sets of) rules that partly express the lessons learnt by Sida and other donors from practical development co-operation experience of what works well and what does not. At they same time, they strongly communicate the current Sida (and donor) values on how we should view poverty reduction and Sida’s role in development co-operation. These rules shall guide the behaviour of Sida staff, not least in interaction with partner countries. The extent to which they are rules-in-use and not just rules-in-form remains an open question. Institutions perform both individual and social functions. 13 First of all, they facilitate decision making and behaviour for individual actors in recurrent interaction situations. Besides, our own following of the rules facilitates the behaviour of others, by shaping their expectations about how we will behave. ‘[S]ocial institutions’ thereby ‘reduce the social uncertainty in the system by making the actions of the agents more predictable’. 14 They solve co-ordination problems between individuals and provide ‘standard solutions to recurring social interaction problems’. 15 These are important social functions. Hence institutions corre- late social activity over time, between actors and situations and thus bring structure and stability to soci- ety. They ‘facilitate order’. 16
8 Hargreaves Heap (1989), pp. 4 and 116–119 9 Ostrom (1999), p. 37 10 North (1995), p. 16 11 On the role of values for rules, see Bush (1988), p. 126–128. 12 Sida (2002; 2005) 13 Cf. Vanberg (1993), p. 172. 14 Knudsen (1993), p. 269 15 Vanberg (1993), p. 190 16 According to Kasper and Streit (1998), p. 30, this is the ‘key function’ of institutions. SupportINg the DevelopmeNt of INStItutIoNS – formAl AND INformAl ruleS – utv WorkINg pAper 2005:3
Institutions prevail in all areas of social life, at all levels and can be categorised in a number of ways. One important distinction is the one already made between formal and informal rules. Formal rules are con- sciously designed by humans and often codified in written form – examples are constitutions, laws and regulations. They are also often enforced by some external authority. The police and the courts, for instance, enforce the rule of law. Enforcement requires enforcing organisations. Informal rules evolve spontaneously and unintentionally over time through human interaction, and take the form of unwritten conventions, routines, customs, codes of conduct and behavioural norms. 1 Informal rules are often self- enforced, because all (or most) actors find it beneficial to adhere to them (as long as others do too), for instance to honour promises or speak Swedish in Sweden. Those who do not abide by the informal rules of society can expect the other actors to show their disapproval even to the extent of expelling them from the group. 18 Institutions can be categorised functionally, according to the types of activity that they regulate. Political rules regulate political activity and determine the characteristics of the political system (single or multi party system, for instance). They include rules for how political power shall be distributed and among whom, procedures for political decision-making and for the electoral process. They define, for instance, the relationship between government and parliament and – of crucial importance in several Sida partner countries – between the ruling party and state organs (party supremacy or ‘independent’ state, for example). Formal rules may be expressed in a constitution, but informal political rules may also apply – for instance those of the political culture and debate. Informal political rules may also imply that what appears to be free multi-party elections are not – at least not according to the logic of the ‘Western’ political system. The formal election rules may prove ineffective in practice, because actors – political candidates as well as the electorate – instead adhere to co-existing informal rules, such as those which Patrick Chabal refers to as the neo-patrimonial political system prevailing in ‘black’ Africa. 19
may be broadly grouped into two categories: those that define the forms of ownership of the means of production, and those that define the mechanisms for resource allocation and co-ordination of economic activity. 20 A market economic system can then simply be described as one where private property rights and the market mechanism dominate, while a centrally planned or directed economic system is domi- nated by state or collective ownership and bureaucratic/administrative co-ordination. In the former socialist economic (and political) system of Tanzania, for example, central formal economic rules were the following: state ownership of the ‘commanding heights’ through parastatal monopoly in several eco- nomic sectors; centrally determined prices of many consumer and producer goods; severe regulation of 1 Some scholars distinguish between organic and pragmatic rules, following the terminology of Menger (1963), Book 3, Chap- ters 1–2, pp. 129–159. See Schotter (1986), pp. 117–118. 18 Kasper and Streit (1998), pp. 31 and 100, make a more refined categorisation of what is here referred to as formal and infor- mal rules. They categorise institutions, firstly, according to the way they come about, and distinguish between external and internal rules. External rules, such as laws, are designed and imposed from above, and internal rules, such as customs, evolve gradually through human interaction. Secondly, they categorise institutions according to the way they are sanctioned, and now distinguish between formal and informal rules. Sanctions for non-compliance with formal rules rely on a formally organised mechanism, whereas non-compliance with informal rules is sanctioned through decentralised, spontaneous social feedback. Although the external-internal and formal-informal categories not always coincide, the authors note that external institutions often are enforced formally and internal institutions tend to be enforced informally. 19 Patrick Chabal (2003) uses ‘black Africa’ to refer to the countries south of the North African countries and north of the South African Republic. See further Chabal and Daloz (1999) on the ‘informalization of politics’ in Africa. 20 Categories inspired by János Kornai (1992). Yüklə 267,75 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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