Politics for Tomorrow hat dies direkt geteilt
Against Fetishizing Institutional Adaptability --from the Systems Thinking from the Margin Collaborative's draft Propositions for Institutional Design *** Stability is Temporarily Purchased — Equilibrium is the exception, not the rule. The reliance of institutional space on external labor and energy creates a complex set of pressures. Internally, institutions must balance between maintaining regularities that facilitate the choreography of multiple kinds of actors and creating learning processes and reform mechanisms that allow for both molecular and molar change. Externally, institutions strive to shape their environment in ways that support their continued existence while responding to a world that, on multiple relevant scales, is changing unpredictably. Both internally and externally, institutions confront an adaptability/predictability trade off. This explains why the tendency towards conservatism—in the most literal sense of arresting change—is powerful, perhaps unavoidable to a degree. Yet as a principle, institutional conservatism has failed because of its hidden revolutionary prerequisites. Modernity’s great ambition of extending predictability through control—of reducing all large worlds to small worlds—bottoms out at the attempt to geo-engineer the planetary system into a stable foundation of progress. On its own, however, increasing the adaptability of institutions does not provide a coherent alternative. Even when an internal balance of stability and evolution can be coordinated with greater external flexibility, the increasing adaptability of institutions, if uncoordinated, threatens to reproduce the chaos and redundancies of unregulated markets. Adaptability is not a meaningful end in and of itself. Institutional design must find new ways of combining adaptability and predictability, while at the same time honestly accounting for the costs that are the unavoidable consequence of increasing one at the expense of the other. Institutions are ecologies that enable predictive forms of agency. Among other functions, they create and regulate the algebras that underpin the capacity of actors to learn and make different kinds of projections into the future. To formulate it another way, institutional space emerges when the structured activity of agents creates a threshold between the conditions of predictive agency and the external world where these conditions do not hold. The regularities do not have to be static—they can be stereotyped processes or cycles. Every institution fixes certain conditions and leaves multiple other aspects of its internal life fluid and undetermined. But an institution where rules were all continuously changing and renegotiable would resemble the croquet match in Alice in Wonderland or, more realistically, it would be constantly teetering on the precipice of war.