Research
Institutional failure is usually read as a shortfall in capacity. That account struggles with a particular pattern: institutions that remain formally capable, retain staff and mandate, and still underdeliver in the same way across long periods and across changes of government.
The work starts from a different possibility. Delay, opacity, and discretion are not only failures of administration. They can also be resources, and resources are defended. The question becomes who an arrangement serves, and what would have to change politically before it gave way.
Cases
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.
The mechanism
The interests of political and bureaucratic actors diverge from the institution’s stated purpose, so effective performance stops being what anyone is rewarded for.
The institution continues to operate, and may retain formal capacity, while consistently failing to deliver the outcomes it exists to produce.
Underperformance is not costless to everyone. Delay, opacity, and discretion generate advantages for those positioned to capture them.
Because the arrangement is valuable to some actors, they work to keep it intact. Dysfunction is defended rather than merely tolerated.
Framework
Five moving parts, examined together rather than in isolation.
Rules, mandates, and procedures, examined as arrangements that allocate advantage rather than as neutral machinery.
Projects
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.
Approach
Semi-structured interviewing with people inside and around institutions.
Cases developed carefully enough to carry analytical weight.
Reading cases against one another to separate the general from the particular.
Thematic analysis and structured coding of interview material.
Survey and policy data analysis using R and SPSS.
Reading formal rules, mandates, and reform documents against observed practice.
Unresolved