Developing countries commonly adopt reforms to improve their governments yet they usually fail to produce more functional and effective governments. Andrews argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. However, there are realistic solutions emerging from institutional reforms in some developing countries. Lessons from these experiences suggest that reform limits, although challenging to adopt, can be overcome by focusing change on problem solving through an incremental process that involves multiple agents.

In recent years Business Schools have been the fastest growning part of the higher education system. This book assesses this development, and articulates a forward looking research agenda on the study of business schools as institutions.

This book reviews the theoretical perspectives on institutional development (ID) and third world city management. It considers the practice of ID in city management by reviewing two related cases; on organizational strengthening and building a planning capability - both in local government. The synthesizing chapters offer some guidelines on, and tests for, ID in city management practice. The book therefore seeks to identify some general principles to guide the ID process in relation to third world city management.

This book analyzes the role played by initial endowments and colonizer identity in seeking to explain institutional development in former colonies. It presents a model of two styles of imperialism that integrates the colonial origin and endowment views explaining current institutions. The authors argue that Great Britain and Portugal adopted an ‘economically-oriented’ style, which was pragmatic and sensitive to initial conditions. For this style of imperialism the endowment view is applicable. In contrast, France employed a ‘politically-oriented’ style of imperialism, in which ideological and political motivations were more present. This led to a uniform colonial policy that largely disregarded initial endowments. In turn, the case of Spain represents a hybrid of the two models. The empirical analysis presented here reveals a remarkable degree of heterogeneity in the relationship of endowments and colonizer identity with current institutions.

‘Institutional Change and Economic Development’ discusses not just theoretical issues but a diverse range of real-life institutions – political, bureaucratic, fiscal, financial, corporate, legal, social and industrial – in the context of dozens of countries across time and space, spanning Britain, Switzerland and the USA in the past to Botswana, Brazil, and China today.

While the literature on “new institutionalism” explains the stability of institutional arrangements within countries and the divergence of paths of institutional development between countries, Federico Ferrara takes a “historical institutionalist” approach to theorize dynamic processes of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change in explaining the development of political institutions. Ferrara synthesizes “power-based” or “power-distributional” explanations and “ideas-based” “legitimation explanations.” He specifies the psychological “microfoundations” of processes of institutional development, drawing heavily from the findings of experimental psychology to ensure that the explanation is grounded in clear and realistic assumptions regarding human motivation, cognition, and behavior. Aside from being of interest to scholars and graduate students in political science and other social-scientific disciplines whose research concentrates on the genesis of political institutions, their evolution over time, and their impact on the stability of political order and the quality of governance, the book will be required reading in graduate courses and seminars in comparative politics where the study of institutions and their development ranks among the subfield’s most important subjects.

Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development demonstrates the importance of one of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics winners Elinor Ostrom's research program. The Bloomington School has become one of the most dynamic, well recognized and productive centers of the New Institutional Theory movement. Its ascendancy is considered to be the result of a unique and extremely successful combination of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and hard-nosed empiricism. This book demonstrates that the well-known interdisciplinary and empirical agenda of the Bloomington Research Program is the result of a less-known but very bold proposition: an attempt to revitalize and extend into the new millennium a traditional mode of analysis illustrated by authors like Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Madison and Tocqueville. As such, the School tries to synthesize the traditional perspectives with the contemporary developments in social sciences and thus to re-ignite the old approach in the new intellectual and political context of the twentieth century. The book presents an outline and a systematic analysis of the vision behind the Bloomington Research Program in Institutional Analysis and Development, explaining its basic assumptions and its main themes as well as the foundational philosophy that frames its research questions and theoretical and methodological approaches. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social science, especially those in the fields of economics, political sciences, sociology and public administration.