Where it starts
The puzzle
A capacity account explains a shortfall. It explains a repeating pattern less well.
Research framework
Institutions read not as neutral machinery but as arrangements that distribute advantage.
Rules, mandates, and procedures, examined as arrangements that allocate advantage rather than as neutral machinery.
What I'm working on
The Profits of Dysfunction: Political Incentives and Institutional Failure in South Asia
Examines how institutional dysfunction may be sustained as a rent-generating mechanism in alternating-elite regimes.
When the State Falters: The Political Economy of Policy Failure in Migration Governance
Examines how political elites, bureaucratic actors, and intermediaries can benefit from delays, opacity, and discretionary enforcement.
Where the work sits
Comparative research on institutions, political incentives, and governance.
Cases shown are those represented in current research. Comparative work across the wider Global South is a research interest rather than a completed case set.
Research notebook
Observations, questions, and reading that sit behind the formal output.
The absence of an institution and the failure of an institution produce similar experiences at the counter, but they are not the same political problem and do not have the same remedy.
If discretion is where rules become outcomes, how much of institutional performance is decided at a level that formal reform never reaches?
Work on rents, path dependence, and limited access orders keeps arriving at the same point from different directions: arrangements survive when somebody has reason to defend them.
Interviews conducted for the migration governance study repeatedly located the friction not in the written rule but in the interval between steps, where waiting itself became the resource.
Reform that changes formal rules without changing what actors are rewarded for may alter documentation more than it alters outcomes.
Comparative material from Sri Lanka and Pakistan suggests family resemblance across cases, but resemblance is not yet a mechanism. Establishing that is the next problem.
Unresolved
Conceptual terrain
Ideas the research leans on, argues with, and returns to.
Advantages generated by an arrangement rather than by production. Where dysfunction produces rents, ending dysfunction has a cost for someone.
Arrangements become harder to displace as actors organise around them. History does not merely precede the present; it constrains it.
The judgement exercised where rules are incomplete. It is often where an institution’s real distributional decisions are made.
The ability to implement. Treating every failure as a capacity shortfall assumes performance is always wanted, which is the assumption in question.
Regularised practice that operates alongside formal rules, sometimes substituting for them and sometimes quietly sustaining them.
The distance between the rule as written and the rule as experienced. The size of that gap is itself a political outcome.
IDRG
Researching why institutions persist, adapt, and underperform.