Institutions for Fragile States

A “best practice” rests on a causal inference about the relationship between an aspect of institutional design, management practice, or policy, on the one hand, and an important outcome, such as willingness to lay down arms, income growth, higher revenues, etc. Oral histories and other types of ethnographies can help us describe the institution or practice in question. They can help us understand the effects of context. They can help direct attention to possible causal relationships. To further ground the hunches ethnographies generate, however, it is important to assess, systematically, the before-after status of program beneficiaries or institutional performance, or the differences in these outcomes across similar locales, only some of which have been affected by a change in rules, practices, or policies. These “natural experiments” are especially important for these reasons.

In fragile states, “natural experiments” are often hard to frame. Sometimes an effect does not appear unless a policy has been in place for a long time or unless several conditions are present at once. The context may be so volatile that it is difficult to control for extraneous influences and thus hard to offer reliable generalizations. These problems do not plague all questions about building institutions in fragile states, however. Whenever possible, our program tries to move its work into a third “social science” phase, in which teams of faculty, Ph.D. students, and host-country counterparts carry out systematic investigation.

The gold standard for this kind of research is the randomized trial. MIT’s Poverty Action Lab has developed this approach in contexts similar to those in which our program operates. In many instances, however, random assignment of a policy change or institutional form to communities or individuals is impossible. Instead, we try to take advantage of “natural experiments” that occur when we can evaluate conditions before and after a change or across locales that are exposed to a new policy or practice at different times.

Teams for this part of the program first work together on the oral history segment of the project. They help develop a proposal for external funding, which Institutions for Fragile States will seek to facilitate. After the larger research group reviews the research design, the team proceeds with the work, reporting back to the program community on a semi-annual basis. At least one published academic paper and at least one presentation to local and global policy makers must result from each team’s work. In most cases, we anticipate that the research will generate the basis for one or more Ph.D. dissertations or faculty and student-produced articles.

^{Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire (Arthur Boutellis, 2008)}