WPS5707


Policy Research Working Paper                     5707




       Intersubjective Meaning and Collective
             Action in ‘Fragile’ Societies
             Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications

                                Varun Gauri
                               Michael Woolcock
                                 Deval Desai




The World Bank
Development Research Group
Poverty and Inequality Team
and Human Development and Public Services Team
June 2011
Policy Research Working Paper 5707


  Abstract
  The capacity to act collectively is not just a matter of                          and events. Though this is a general phenomenon, it is
  groups sharing interests, incentives and values (or being                         particularly salient in countries characterized by societal
  sufficiently small), as standard economic theory predicts,                        fragility and endemic conflict. We develop a conceptual
  but a prior and shared understanding of the constituent                           account of intersubjective meanings, explain its relevance
  elements of problem(s) and possible solutions. From                               to development practice and research, and examine its
  this standpoint, the failure to act collectively can stem                         implications for development work related to building
  at least in part from relevant groups failing to ascribe a                        the rule of law and managing common pool resources.
  common intersubjective meaning to situations, processes




  This paper is a joint product of the Poverty and Inequality Team; and Human Development and Public Services Team,
  Development Research Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make
  a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on
  the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The authors may be contacted at mwoolcock@worldbank.org; Vgauri@worldbank.
  org; and ddesai@worldbank.org.




         The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development
         issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the
         names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those
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                                                       Produced by the Research Support Team
             Intersubjective Meaning and Collective Action in ‘Fragile’ Societies:
                       Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications1



                                          Varun Gauri, World Bank

                                      Michael Woolcock, World Bank

                                          Deval Desai, World Bank




1
 The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone, and should not be attributed to the World
Bank, its Executive Directors or the countries they represent. Our thanks to Alexandre Marc, Ghazia Aslam,
Kanishka Balasuriya and participants at various workshops hosted by the Social Development Department at the
World Bank for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Email addresses for correspondence:
vgauri@worldbank.org, mwoolcock@worldbank.org and ddesai@worldbank.org.
Introduction

This paper explores the significance of the concept of ‘intersubjective meaning,’ or ‘intersubjectivity,’ for
developing countries generally, but particularly those characterized by ‘societal fragility’.2 By
intersubjective meaning we refer to the extent to which multiple relevant actors share a common
subjective understanding of the nature of the problems they face, and the possible solutions to those
problems. For example, facing persistent questions about the legitimate use of public resources, it
matters whether key actors regard the giving of such resources to associates as corruption or upholding
a social norm; all parties can share, as an ethical value and policy aspiration, a desire for public servants
to be prudent stewards of resources entrusted to them, even as their actual responses to this desire,
and its perceived legitimacy by internal and external actors, can vary considerably.3

        Countries characterized by ‘societal fragility’ are those that possess, among other things4,
numerous qualitatively different ways of understanding and prioritizing their core problems and
solutions. So understood, societal fragility – or its opposite, social cohesion – is not a static, immutable
property of a country or an essentialist characteristic of a particular ‘culture’, nor something that is
axiomatically a function of ethnic diversity or ‘linguistic fractionalization’ (however defined or
measured); it is, rather, a socially constructed and historically produced administrative capacity, which is
to say, a capacity that varies over time and is forged (or squandered) in the crucible of domestic politics
and legal systems, in response to internal and external challenges. For example, though Indonesia is a
quintessentially ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983), so named because it has a national coherence
that belies its status as one of the most culturally diverse and geographically dispersed countries in the
world, its remarkably rapid and peaceful ‘triple transition’ since 1997 – from autocracy to democracy,
from command to market economy, from centralized to decentralized administration – can be properly
interpreted not only as a product of ‘effective policy choices’, but its social cohesion, on which the
design and implementation of these policies rests. In short, Indonesia’s social cohesion has manifest
itself in a capacity to generate and sustain over time a legitimate domestic political consensus about the

2
  Intersubjectivity may refer to emotions and mental states whose meanings are absent, weak, or contested; but
for this essay, we use the terms interchangeably.
3
  Having discussed several differences between Western and Middle Eastern understandings of “corruption”,
Rosen (2010: 81) concludes by arguing that “*f+or Afghans to understand corruption as Americans do more or less
entails their having to experience the whole web of religious, social and economic concepts that Americans have
experienced. That really is asking too much.”
4
  Other such factors can include high economic inequality, a weak ‘rule of law’, endemic poverty, and pervasive
crime.
                                                                                                                  2
nature of the problems it confronts, which of its many such problems to prioritize, and how to manage
the inherently difficult trade-offs and distributional consequences associated with realizing possible
solutions to them.5

        This thesis has direct relevance for development practice. For some time, it has been apparent
that the quality of governance is of crucial importance for development outcomes, that, as Rodrik et al
(2004) put it, “institutions rule”. As a consequence, the avowed goal of current development practice
and analysis is typically less to “get the prices right” than to get the institutions right. This aspiration
holds across a variety of sectors, including basic service delivery, infrastructure provision, trade policy,
and financial regulation, as well as for national political institutions more generally. But it is by now well-
recognized that if institutions are to be understood as “the rules of the game” (North 1990), the rules
consist not only, and perhaps not primarily, of the formal, written rules that govern the functioning of
organizations, but the informal practices and “political cultures” that shape the behavior and
expectations of people who interact with those organizations (Fukuyama 2004, 2011).6 This means that
the external analyst, or policymaker, cannot and should not make recommendations for institutional
change based simply on the way that new formal incentives are expected to affect behavior, but also
needs to analyze repeated practices and the shared meanings that underlie them, however unclear their
basis in observable incentives.

        Two examples might help illustrate this. In public health, the observed obstacles to raising
immunization rates include, on the demand side, the travel and opportunity cost that mothers incur
when they bring children to vaccination sites. Policymakers typically respond by providing childhood
vaccines for free and extending their provision to outlying health posts. But the resistance to
immunization can also include factors such as the historically constructed social position of women,
which affect their ability to control family resources (Caldwell 1986), as well as the experiences of rural
inhabitants with colonial and national efforts to sterilize populations and otherwise limit fertility, which
make them distrustful of modern medicine (Connolly 2008). Moreover, resistance to immunization can

5
  Of course, whether and how this cohesion withstands subsequent challenges – which could emerge in the wake
of either development failure (recession, civil war) or success (expanding education, infrastructure and
telecommunications) – remains to be seen.
6
  Briggs (2008: 22) usefully argues that, even if institutions are understood in Northian terms, we need to go
beyond the narrower (if more technical) analyses of game theory – which focuses on “how the players play
particular games” – to ask “why those games, and not others, arise in the first place, why some players, and not
others, get to play, how rules of engagement shift . . . and how players acquire the resources – both tangible and
intangible – with which to play.”
                                                                                                                     3
also be driven by people’s understandings of the core mechanisms that determine one’s health and
illness (Nichter 1995), which can range from physiology to ancestors to spirits to fate. Thus, the
obstacles to raising immunization rates are not simply straightforward economic costs, but the
meanings that potential recipients ascribe to the practice of immunization itself, which are heavily
conditioned by historical experience and a host of (not readily observable) cultural phenomena.

        Land administration provides another telling example. For most contemporary development
professionals, ‘land’ is a commodity to be bought, sold and ‘improved’, an economic resource with
exchange value determined by the security of the title to it (‘property rights’) and its prevailing market
price. That is certainly one meaning of ‘land’, but both in the past and still today land can mean
something else entirely, which in turn can be a basis for serious conflict when these different meanings
interact. In his masterful discussion of the development of land transactions in colonial New England, for
example, Cronon (1983: 70) astutely observes that the Indians “thought they were selling one thing and
the English thought they were buying another”. For the Native Americans, ‘land’ was named for its
functional purpose (“at or near the cleared lands”7), not nostalgic longings of towns back in Britain
(Ipswich, Gloucester, Manchester); groups could grant access (usufruct rights) to land, but the very
notion that individuals could have exclusive ownership of it (property rights) was inconceivable – land
was intimately associated with collective identity, connections to ancestors and the procurement of
livelihoods.8 Disputes borne of such ontologically discordant understandings of ‘land’ continue to play
out today. As the World Bank has recently learned the hard way in Cambodia, the disbursement of
property titles, even (or especially) to ostensibly public land, is not merely a complex logistical exercise,
but a task that requires detailed ongoing attention to managing the evolving local politics and
contentious claim-making that necessarily accompanies any effort to alter the status of ‘land’.9

        These examples notwithstanding, one may ask: given that here is surely no shortage of weighty
and pressing matters to ponder in development, why allow oneself to be distracted from enhancing


7
  This is the Indian name corresponding to Plymouth County, Massachusetts (Cronon 1983: 65).
8
  Cronon (1983: 75) goes on to note that “*t+o the abstraction of legal boundaries was added the abstraction of
price, a measurement of property’s value assessed on a unitary scale. More than anything else, it was the
treatment of land and property as commodities traded at market that distinguished English conceptions of
ownership from Indian ones.”
9
  The World Bank’s news release on the serious societal tension surrounding this project, its eventual cancellation
and subsequent review by the Inspection Panel, is available at
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTINSPECTIONPANEL/Resources/LMAP_press_release.pdf?&resourceurlnam
e=LMAP_press_release.pdf
                                                                                                                  4
economic growth, building infrastructure, improving health, education, governance, irrigation and
agriculture etc in favor of a complex, subtle issue? The answer is: Because the fact, not merely the
truism, that different people see the world in different ways – and do so for reasons that go beyond
having contrasting interests, incentives and ‘values’ (as is typical of orthodox disputes between domestic
political parties or professional groups) – is a key factor in explaining collective action failure, and such
failure is central to explaining how countries (and groups) respond to both shocks and opportunities,
which in turn is crucial to explaining long- and short- run development trajectories (Rodrik 1999). Put
differently, societies characterized by low levels of shared intersubjective meaning will be more likely to
suffer from pervasive collective action failures10, which in turn will undermine their capacity to respond
to challenges and opportunities alike; it is in this sense that such societies can be ‘fragile’.11 In making
the connection between intersubjectivity and collective action, we hope to show in this paper that
intersubjective meaning is logically and empirically prior to interests, incentives and values, which (along
with group size) are the standard referents in economic theories of collective action failure.

          The paper proceeds as follows. In Section One we further develop the notion of intersubjective
meaning and its significance for development. Section Two applies the concept to two prominent
accounts of collective action and to three related areas of development thinking and practice: (a) North,
Wallis and Weingast’s (2009) historical account of collective action for minimizing violent conflict and
developing the rule of law, (b) Ostrom’s (1990, 2005) account of the management of common pool
resources, and (c) donor work on the rule of law. The section aims to show how leaving intersubjectivity
out of social scientific explanations of collective action failure leave significant lacunae in the
explanatory narratives. Section Three concludes by summarizing the implications of our argument for
development policy in fragile societies.



     I.       Understanding and Applying Intersubjectivity’s Analytical Foundations

The French revolutionaries of 1848 chose the now-famous trilogy “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” as the
motto for the Second Republic, inscribing it on everything from letterheads to official buildings. At the
onset of the Second Empire just four years later, however, Louis-Napoleon ordered the erasure of the
10
   Mansuri and Rao (2011) refer to this as ‘civil society failure’, to distinguish it from (but include it in the same
vernacular frame as) the more familiar notions of market and state failure. Our focus on intersubjectivity and
collection action failure could be construed as a sub-set of the broader notions of civil society failure.
11
   On this point, see the related arguments in Rodrik (1999) and Easterly, Ritzen and Woolcock (2006).
                                                                                                                         5
motto wherever possible. But after Parisian leaders had painted the phrase on the walls of the
Commune in 1870 (followed by “ou Mort”), the Third republic readopted it, despite the misgivings of
many who thought it implied a leveling of society. Under German occupation, the government replaced
the trilogy with another: “Work, Family, Fatherland.” Finally, the words reappeared in the 1946 and
1958 French Constitutions, and now have become the national motto.12

        What can be learned from this controversy? For many social scientists, particularly
methodological individualists, the answer would be: Not much. From this standpoint, changing a motto
might signal to supporters and rivals that a particular French faction has in fact achieved power, but the
ideational content of the motto – the significance of using, say, “fraternité” rather than one of the
proposed alternative terms for the sense of French collective understanding (e.g., “unité,” “force”) – is
unlikely to be taken seriously as a causal factor in historical and political explanation. We question that
working assumption. The burden of this paper is to develop an account of how shared meanings arise,
and demonstrate how they constrain and enable certain forms of collective action.

        Intersubjective meanings are concepts, arguments, beliefs and judgments that cannot be
attributed to individuals; rather, they are the shared property of groups of human beings. The reason
that they cannot be the property of a single individual is that they are not abstractions inside one’s head
(as in, for instance, a picture one might have of heaven), but are rooted in the rules that govern social
practices. They both arise from and are constitutive of coordinated social action, and would not exist in
the form that they do were it not for the particular forms of coordination that prevail in a society.

        Further illustrations from a variety of fields might be helpful. Bodily and mental health, for
instance, are difficult to assess without a widely shared understanding of the normal range of physical
and mental experience. The range of activities that a society typically expects its members to perform,
and the attendant social judgments, constitute the primary standards against which one assesses one’s
own (and others’) “health.” More concretely, they provide the benchmarks for evaluating the sufficiency
and “healthiness” of a person’s physical attributes (e.g., anatomy, height, weight, range of motion) and
mental experiences (e.g., a unified identity, self-control).13 In a related way, knowledge claims, whether

12
   See http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france_159/institutions-and-politics_6814/the-symbols-of-the-
republic_2002/liberty-equality-fraternity_1503.html
13
   See Brown (1995) and Payer (1996) on the social construction of medicine and medical concepts. See also
Watters (2010) on the manner in which Western mental health professionals, via their ‘definitive’ Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM IV), have dramatically altered how the rest of the world comes to
                                                                                                                   6
one’s own or those of another, rely on concepts such as “certainty,” “confidence,” or “falsifiability,”
whose meanings derive from the coordinated social practices of scientific investigation (see Kuhn 1970,
Lakatos 1978). Perhaps the most familiar forms of intersubjectivity arise in psychology. Psychic states
such as love and friendship require not only mutual affection but a resonating with the emotions and
the inner world of an intimate – grasping, at least for a moment, each other’s state of mind. In other
words, they require not only mutual affection but the mutual recognition of mutual affection (Stern
2004, Ornstein 1991), a recognition which in turn is supported by social practices such as courtship, the
intimate marriage, and the nuclear family.

        Although sidelined in rational choice accounts of history and social and political phenomena,
intersubjectivity is hardly unrecognized in social theory more broadly. Wedeen (2002) summarizes the
work of social, political, philosophical, and anthropological theorists who have developed accounts of
socially rooted meaning-making practices (see also Swidler 1986). It would be easy to multiply the
examples.14 Still, intersubjectivity remains marginal in development, which remains heavily influenced
by standard welfare economics. In the remainder of this section, we focus on the theoretical
underpinnings of intersubjectivity rather than specific examples, and for this we primarily follow
accounts from Charles Taylor (1985, 1992, 1995a, 1995b) and Pierre Bourdieu (1980).

        It is useful to start with criticisms of intersubjective meanings. From a certain point of view, it is
flatly commonsensical that meanings must be located within the minds of individuals rather than in
societies. After all, all social phenomena – including laws, customs, roles, and norms – would not exist if
individuals did not. No individuals, no societies. So in some sense it looks as though individuals are the
causal agents in the construction of social meaning. Taylor (1995a), however, takes aim at forms of
“atomism” such as this. He locates their principal theoretical source in welfare economics, which holds
that value judgments ought to be based on outcomes, and particularly on the raw, uninterpreted
happiness or utility that they provide to individuals in their subjective experience. Importantly, the
utilities to be weighed in such states of affairs are those of individuals. So welfare economics supports
the more broadly individualist argument for locating meanings in individual minds when it holds that, in
the last analysis, all goods are the goods (and products) of individuals.

understand and respond to mental health concerns (e.g. donors presuming that all tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka
must have suffered ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’, which in turn led to millions of dollars being spent on the
deployment of counselors and therapists – except that Sri Lankans themselves, it turned out, seemed not to be
‘suffering’ from this condition at all).
14
   See for instance Swidler and Watkins (2010) and Hall and Lamont (2010).
                                                                                                                   7
          There is a qualification: welfare economics recognizes public goods. For example, it may, with
available technology, be impossible for one ship to benefit from a lighthouse without many others
benefiting as well. But, as Taylor notes (1995a: 129), the ultimate value of a public good in welfare
economics – such as a lighthouse, a dam, a road, or national defense – derives from the value (utility) it
has for individuals. The public good remains “decomposable” into a set of hypothetical goods available
to individuals; if there were no people, one would not easily conclude that the lighthouse were a “good”
at all.

          Taylor argues that this approach – in which all goods are located in individual minds – is
fundamentally mistaken. In particular, it fails to take account of the peculiar nature of thoughts.
Thoughts exist against a background dimension of meaning and “require a background of available
meanings in order to be the thoughts that they are” (p. 131). In other words, there is an analogy
between thinking and making a move in some rule-governed human activity in which questions of
validity and invalidity arise, such as a game. Taylor notes that it makes no sense to speak of a queen-side
castle in checkers. Similarly, when a bad historical movie portrays a neolithic villager who is happy to
have a “sophisticated” lover, it is jarring. Nothing the villager could say could count as describing
someone as “fulfilling” or “sophisticated” because the whole way of classifying things as “fulfilling” or
“sophisticated” did not exist for him (if we are right about his world). His language lacked the resources
to make those judgments. And the lack wasn’t contingent – there is no way to imagine a way around it
(as in the failure of neolithic villagers to build pyramids, which might have been different had they had a
larger labor force). The impossibility of conceiving such an event suggests that validity is at play.

          Taylor argues that meaning events are to be distinguished from plain events. Meaning events
exist in two-dimensional space – a communication takes the meaning it does only against the
background of shared meanings. One way to understand this is to draw on Saussure’s linguistic
distinction between langue (the abstract systematic principles of a language) and parole (an individual
speech act). To understand individual speech acts, you have to understand the rules of the language in
which they are expressed. This is analogous to the game of chess. To understand the meaning of
particular move, you have to understand the rules of the game and the set of meaningful moves to
which those rules give rise. But there is an important distinction between games like chess and human
language. The acts of parole all presuppose the existence of langue and make no sense without it, but
the latter is constantly recreated in acts of parole. In other words, speech acts have the ability to change

                                                                                                             8
the language itself, whereas a chess move will not change the rules of chess. And most relevant for the
purposes of the present paper, the abstract systematic principles of a language affect the ways in which
individuals speak and think – they have a causal relationship to every individual speech act – even if
those rules cannot be located in the mind of any single individual. No individual could internalize all of
the explicit and implicit rules of a system of language, with all its variation and dynamism. Rather, the
abstract principles of language arise from the coordinated practice of communication. Even if, over time,
langue has taken the shape it does through acts of parole, it does not mean that langue is
decomposable into all of the speech acts that have been made in human history – the speech acts that
have shaped langue were what they were only against the background of the langue of their day.

        Taylor argues that although Saussure’s distinction is about language, the same could be said of
other phenomena in social life, such as roles, laws, offices and statuses. Expressions regarding them, and
judgments and social debates about them, share the same two-dimensional structure of speech acts; in
other words, they only make sense against a specific set of shared background understandings and
practices. As in the case of language, these shared background meanings and practices are not
decomposable. They are not merely accidentally or contingently related to those judgments and
experiences; rather, those judgments and experiences could not exist without them. By contrast, it is
quite possible to imagine the benefits that public goods bestow on individuals without the public good
itself – elevated homes and new crops conceivably might provide as much value as a dam. But if one
values a fulfilling life, there is no substitute for the shared meanings and practices in which ‘fulfillment’
is conceivable.

        But then the question arises, where does this shared set of social and political background
meanings reside, if not in individuals? Taylor contends that intersubjective meanings in social and
political life arise from coordinated social practices. “The meanings and norms implicit in these practices
are not just in the minds of the actors but are out there in the practices themselves, practices which
cannot be conceived as a set of individual actions, but which are essentially modes of social relation, of
mutual action” (Taylor 1985, p. 36). In other words, one cannot separate out actions and their causes
(such as incentives) from the cultural background that gives meaning to those actions. As Tilly (1999: 20)
puts it, culture and structure are two parts of the “same stream of transactions”.

        When struggling to make sense of shared background meanings that are not the property of
individuals, analysts are often tempted by two degenerate conceptualizations of culture. First is the
                                                                                                                9
notion that groups or societies think in a kind of mystical, quasi-Hegelian fashion. Here one imagines a
thick culture that, like an ether, pervades and determines history. Second, some analysts (particularly
methodological individualists using surveys to get at meanings and identities), take the view that culture
inheres within the minds of individuals as an essence. Methodological individualists typically look for
correlations between self-reported beliefs and behavior at the individual level (e.g., are members of a
particular religion more likely to exhibit altruism?). In contrast to these views, we want to emphasize an
account in which intersubjective meanings are a necessary consequence of the structure of meaning
events, which require a shared background – or what Taylor (2003) calls ‘social imaginaries’ – to take the
form that they do. When individuals make political, social, and economic choices, their expression takes
the meaning it does because the individuals themselves – as members of a community or communities –
know the social background, and those who interpret their choices are confident of the meanings they
ascribe to the choices because they know that the individuals who have acted are acting against the
shared social background. As Taylor (1985: 40) famously puts it, “What the ontology of mainstream
social science lacks is the notion of meaning as not simply for an individual subject; of a subject who can
be a ‘we’ as well as an ‘I’.”

        Because many analysts view shared meanings as cultural essences rather than interpretations of
coordinated social practice, there is a tendency to emphasize their role in the construction of ethnicities,
group boundaries and identities. But it is important to emphasize that intersubjective meanings involve
much more than group identities. Rather, they are constitutive for the full variety of spheres in which
coordinated social action occurs, including social relations, politics and governance, economics and
exchange, and spiritual practice. In Indonesia, for example, the practice of deliberation leading to a
social agreement is called musywarah. Most notably for our purposes, musywarah is not mere
bargaining, in which various private interests are weighed against each other on the basis of (more or
less equal) positions of leverage and using (more or less fair) processes of aggregation. Rather,
musywarah is a process of deliberation regarding private concerns that engenders its own legitimacy; in
fact, in some accounts, it is an alternative to voting.15 This language for the description of deliberation in
Indonesia enables an experience of organicism in society more difficult to achieve in, say, England, but
disables the widespread use of court-based adjudication.


15
  See Gibson and Woolcock (2008) for a discussion of the role of development projects in shaping the terms of
public deliberation regarding resource allocation and community disputes between high and low status groups in
rural Indonesia.
                                                                                                             10
         But what is true of Indonesia is also true of the North Atlantic world, in which the full array of
social and economic practices that mainstream economics, political science, and other social sciences
assume are the natural behavior of human beings in fact depend on historically constructed
intersubjective meanings. Bargaining and negotiation, for instance, are not natural phenomena; rather
they are social practices of relatively recent invention. Negotiating in the sense that we use the term
today requires a set of understandings about good faith, autonomy, what it means to break off
negotiations, how to enter into negotiations. People cannot bring into negotiations the set of ideas and
norms constitutive of negotiations themselves. “These must be the common property of society before
there can be any question of anyone entering into negotiation or not” (Taylor 1971: 27). And these
practices were developed over the course of history.

         For development theory and practice, this account of intersubjectivity has three general
implications. (The sections below describe two more specific implications for the understanding of
conflict and common pool resources). First, the methods used to grasp the sources of meaning need to
go beyond surveys and questionnaires. Surveys and questionnaires usefully identify the beliefs,
opinions, and evaluations in the minds of individuals, but the shared background understandings
necessary for establishing meaning events rarely receive full articulation in the minds of individuals;
rather, meaning events come to full articulation in particular social contexts. Surveys that aim to elicit
them often fail because they typically do not operate in such a way that the respondent can access them
at will.16 An understanding of intersubjectively constructed concepts requires further ethnographic,
historical, and interpretive work. In particular, social cohesion and “consensus” are not based in
simultaneously held concepts in people’s minds, as evidenced by identical answers to standard
questions; in reality, evidence of cohesion, consensus, and shared intersubjectivity is to be found in
regularities of physical behavior, communicative style, and social organization. For instance, hierarchical
understandings of a society may be more readily observed by looking at how people hold their bodies,
when confronted with an authority figure, than by asking people to answer a survey.




16
  We note that recent work deploying ‘anchoring vignettes’ (e.g., King et al 2004) within household surveys
assessing cross-national phenomena goes some way to addressing this concern. The methodological role of such
vignettes, however, is largely to enhance the construct validity of survey questions (i.e., the extent to which a given
concept, such as ‘government effectiveness’, elicits comparable responses in different contexts). Our concern with
meaning events is broader, including the extent to which survey respondents recognize surveys themselves as a
legitimate means of determining, comparing and disseminating knowledge (and, in turn, shaping policy).
                                                                                                                    11
        The second implication involves what it means to follow a rule, and our understanding of
institutions. Taylor notes that for any given rule, even one as narrow as a mathematical one, the number
of potential misunderstandings is endless, and cites Wittgenstein’s example: “We could imagine
someone to whom we teach a series by giving him a sample range, say 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, . . . He might carry on
quite well till 1000, and then write 1004, 1008, 1012. He is indignant when we tell him he’s got it wrong.
He misunderstood our sample range to be illustrating the rule: ‘Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to
3000, and so on.’” The same is true of all kinds of rules. If you want explain how to get into town, you
might tell someone to just follow the arrows, but how are they to know they are to follow the point of
the arrow rather than the feathers? And of course, it is even more problematic for laws and norms,
which admit of enormous variation in interpretation. Any explanation of what ‘following a rule’ means
will leave some issues unresolved, which require further explanation, ad infinitum. And yet people do
seem to understand how to follow rules, and social coordination does take place. How do people know
what a rule requires them to do?

        Taylor’s answer is that following rules is a social practice rather than a cognitive activity or what
rational choice theorists would call “common knowledge”. To illustrate, he repeats Wittgenstein’s
rhetorical question: “Is what is called ‘obeying a rule’ something it would be possible for only one man
to do only once in his life?” People do frame understandings and representations of what the world is
like, what they are doing, what they aim to do, and what is expected of them. “But much of our
intelligent action in the world, sensitive as it usually is to our situation and goals, is carried on
unformulated. It flows from an understanding that is largely inarticulate” (Taylor 1995b: 170). Taylor
contends that shared understanding is embodied, rooted in the ways that social practices inscribe
knowledge into people’s non-cognitive awareness and habitual activities. It is possible to know how to
get around a place without being able to draw a map of it. Moreover, that practical knowledge about
how to get around a place includes knowledge that a map does not: it includes an awareness of how
events and movement are supposed to unfold in time. Knowledge is embodied. A person might exhibit
deference through the distance he keeps form others, without being able to articulate the rule regarding
the ways in which deference to elders ought to be expressed. To take another example, the normal
back-and-forth of a conversation is rooted in the social practice of how to construct a conversation with
someone, which is not best understood as two distinct actors using and following social rules about how
to talk, but as shared agency, in the same way that dance is shared agency.


                                                                                                           12
         The implication for our understanding of institutions emerges when Taylor draws on Bourdieu’s
concept of the habitus to express this level of understanding. For Bourdieu (1980: 56), the habitus is
“embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history.” For Bourdieu, habitus is
one way in which history is preserved, but the other way in which it is preserved is encoded in the rules
and logic of institutions. Without the habitus, however, institutional rules remain inert, without much
consequence for the unfolding of events. It is the habitus that allows agents to “inhabit institutions, to
appropriate them practically, and so to keep them in activity, continuously pulling from the state of
dead letters, reviving the sense deposited in them, but at the same time imposing the revisions and
transformations that reactivation entails” (1980: 57). Clearly, the upshot for development is that
analyses of institutional rules, without an accompanying assessment of their relation to embodied
knowledge and shared practices, is likely to be of only limited use for “getting institutions right”.17

         The third implication follows from the second. Institutions and intersubjective meanings (or
embodied knowledge) can be reinforcing or divergent. Meanings and institutions are not necessarily “in
tune” with each other. Revolutionary ideas, for example, precede the institutions they intend to create.
Additionally, meanings and institutions can interweave in various ways. There can be a more or less
stable pattern of mutual reinforcement where the meanings strengthen the institutions and keep them
alive, and the institutions continually regenerate the meanings in each succeeding generation. But it
may come to appear that the institutions grows corrupt, and some may call for rectification, which in
turn may lead to the generation of a rival set of meanings (religious reform), or may lead some to
withdraw from the institutions altogether and turn to another practice with a distinct set of meanings
(mass religious conversion). Meanings and institutions can fall out of “tune” with one another: for
instance, technological change can make certain organizations too costly or facilitate the appearance of
a rival institutional form, or a change in the social standing of a group closely associated with a practice
can undermine or strengthen it.18 These will affect the meanings through which the institutions are

17
   In his ‘Lectures in Jurisprudence’, Adam Smith made similar arguments with respect to how the seemingly self-
evident (even ‘natural’) significance of money as a legitimate basis of exchange in fact had to be learned, and was
learned through social practice as part of a broader process of acquiring skills of persuasion and negotiation. “The
offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in fact offering an argument to
persuade one to do so and so as it is in his interest. Men always endeavour to persuade others to be of their
opinion even when the matter is of no consequence to them… And in this manner, every one is practicing oratory
on others thro the whole of his life…” (cited in Purdy, 2010: 15-16).
18
   See also the fascinating accounts in Appiah (2010) on the demise of the gentlemanly duel in Victorian England, of
foot-binding among women in early twentieth-century China, and of global slavery – all practices which had
endured immutably for centuries but which came to an end in a matter of decades (i.e., relatively rapidly), not
                                                                                                                  13
collectively described. Similarly, the meanings of an institutional form can be lost over time, or
undermined by new insights (Taylor 1992).




    II.      Applications to development thinking and practice

We turn now to two particular arenas of collection action – conflict and constitutionalism, and common
pool resource management – and explore some of the salient differences between how they are
understood by mainstream social science and a perspective emphasizing intersubjective meaning.

    (a) Conflict, Constitutionalism, and the Rule of Law


Economic accounts of the origins of political institutions typically argue that new institutions, such as
democracies and constitutions, arise when the expected returns from new forms of social coordination
exceed the expected returns to violence, rent-seeking and other forms of expropriation. Most such
accounts give limited attention to the emergence of norms, beliefs and related social phenomena.
Violence and Social Orders (North, Wallis and Weingast 2009; henceforth NWW) is exceptional in this
regard. While very much an economic account, the book repeatedly emphasizes the significant role of
norms of equality and impersonality in the emergence of what the authors call “open access orders.”
Still, the conceptualization of beliefs does not recognize intersubjectivity, and as a result, we argue that
the book’s explanatory framework is significantly limited. This section describes the NWW approach in
order to illustrate what is lost when accounts of conflict and constitutionalism leave out
intersubjectivity. The NWW approach has also been influential in development policy (for instance, its
framework figures significantly in the 2011 World Development Report), and so an assessment of that
book also illuminates some of the limitations of the mainstream approach to conflict undertaken by
development actors.

          The motivating observation in NWW is that open access orders differ in fundamental ways from
limited access orders. Open access orders have: higher long-term growth rates and especially fewer
years of negative growth; economies and societies with more specialization and division of labor; less


because of economic reasons but because of changes brought about by social movements that successfully altered
the societal bases of honor, prestige and status. One sees similar processes at work today, Appaih argues, in efforts
to delegitimize the practices of sati (bride burning), ‘honor killings’ (e.g., the execution of women who have been
raped, as punishment for shaming their family name) and female genital mutilation.
                                                                                                                  14
large-scale conflict and violence; larger numbers of civil society organizations and private firms; larger
and more decentralized governments; and more social consensus around the norm of treating people
equally and without regard to their personal social connections and positions. The core argument of
NWW is that these differences between countries with open access orders (for which they propose a
rough and ready threshold of GDP per capita of $20,000) and those with closed access orders are no
accident. The goal of the book is to develop an explanatory logic that demonstrates how these
characteristics are mutually reinforcing and give rise to the dual equilibria.

         In the limited access order (or the “natural state”), a category into which NWW collect all
human societies prior to 1800 and almost all low- and middle-income countries today, social order arises
when elites overcome a security dilemma by agreeing to share the future revenues that arise from a
peace pact. The state provides third-party enforcement for a variety of intra-elite bargains and
exchanges; but because the state itself is no more than an intra-elite bargain among the dominant
coalition, it is inherently unstable, and liable to break down as pact participants continually reappraise
the value of social cooperation as new technologies develop and exogenous shocks arise. The core
problem is that the capture of state authority is the main route to economic advancement, and as a
consequence, the stakes of political competition are very high. Some natural states are able to secure
more stability for elites by establishing intra-elite relations on predictable law (predictability for elites
can generate additional rents), creating organizations that endure beyond the lives of their members
(thus becoming “perpetually lived organizations”), and consolidating political control over the military.
Upon crossing various “door-step conditions”, some of these “mature” natural states then make the
transition to open access orders.

        In open access orders, the state permits wide latitude for all individuals to establish new
organizations, especially limited liability corporations and political parties. The emergence of more and
various kinds of organizations erodes the rents that elites had divided among themselves in limited
access orders. It also has the effect of separating political institutions from personal identities, inducing
further specialization of labor and technological innovation through a process of Schumpeterian
competition, and consolidating political control over the military. It exposes every organization –
political, economic, social, and military – to potential competition if it assumes too much political power
or captures excessive rents. Essentially, the emergence of open access to civil society, economic, and
political organizations generates a large number of veto points in a society, and across almost every

                                                                                                                15
issue area and sector. Organizations can coordinate to withdraw support from politicians who overstep
constitutional boundaries and can provide competition to firms that capture excessive rents. The
proliferation of perpetually lived organizations also creates a world in which “impersonal” relations
predominate. These organizations are crucial for the development of a shared belief system in which
people are treated equally and according to impersonal laws.

        Although NWW repeatedly emphasize the importance of beliefs and identities in open access
orders, their conceptualization of beliefs is individualistic rather than intersubjective. Early on, they
clarify that they use the word “society” as shorthand for the aggregate of the individuals, rather than a
causal agent in itself: “We are aware that societies are not actors. Societies do not deal with anything;
individuals do” (NWW p. 13, fn; emphasis in the original). Although their “Note on Beliefs”
acknowledges that they do not explain the origins of beliefs, it is clear from their discussion that
individuals generate beliefs when they compare received explanations (from their parents and schools)
of how the world works with their experience of how it works, and that common beliefs arise from the
largely independent and simultaneous cognitions of all (or most) individuals in a society:

        The two main channels of belief formation are individual experience and education.
        Human beings are genetically programmed to learn in both ways. Human cultures, in
        part, are common information passed on through education, whether formal in the
        sense of classrooms or informal in the sense of parents and others teaching social norms
        to children. Neither way of forming beliefs is completely reliable, in part, because the
        beliefs we draw from experience are inaccurate models of the world around us. (NWW
        p. 28)

In this account, belief systems are purely cognitive phenomena in which aggregates of
individuals come to develop “common information” and shared “models” of external causation.
The notion that the formation and expression of an individual’s beliefs requires a shared set of
background meanings, and that coordinated social practices give rise to shared background
meanings, are foreign to this account. Finally, despite their repeated emphasis on the role of
beliefs in history, they provide almost no direct evidence that beliefs have, in fact, played a
causal role in the development and maintenance of open access orders. At one point, when
arguing that even mature natural states, such as Korea and Venezuela, may not exhibit societal
beliefs consistent with open access, they point to polls showing that many individuals in those
countries would accept military coups in certain circumstances and believe that authoritarians



                                                                                                            16
are better at solving some of society’s problems (NWW p. 139). On this account, the stability of
those societies seems to rest on individual opinions, rather than on coordinated social practices.

        The conceptualization of beliefs as exclusively individualistic, rather than intersubjective
as well as individual, has an important analytical consequence for North, Wallis and Weingast: it
obscures their explanation of constitutional consensus, which is crucial for open access orders.
The control of violence – constitutionalism – depends on what they call a “consensus condition,”
which entails that “citizens in open access orders share beliefs about the appropriateness of
central tenets of their constitution so that they help police the rules by withdrawing support
from officials who seek to violate these tenets” (NWW p. 118). Despite the importance this idea
plays in their account, they provide no direct evidence that such a consensus exists in any open
access order. They argue that in open access orders the control of government is contestable
and subject to “clear and well-understood rules” (NWW p. 111), yet never provide an account of
which constitutional rules are perceived to be clear and well-understood. Constitutions are
“focal points” that “create common expectations among citizens about the behavior of others”
(Weingast 2005), but constitutions contain many provisions, often in conflict. Which constitute
the focal points? How would the analyst even demonstrate that such a consensus condition
existed in a society? It would be difficult even for a large, expensive opinion survey to
characterize the set of conditions that might constitute a fundamental breach of the
constitution. One could observe that the society is at peace, but then to infer from this that a
consensus exists would be to impute a value to the explanatory variable from the value of the
dependent variable. This seems to be what NWW are doing. Wedeen (2002: 718) notes that this
is a characteristic problem with rational choice accounts that understand culture to be the
convergence of individual beliefs. As she puts it, the rational choice concept of “common
knowledge”

        tends to assume the shared quality or commonness of knowledge rather than to
        question how – or the extent to which – such understandings are, in fact, tacitly
        understood or consensually shared. In other words, “common knowledge” derives from
        a consideration of knowledge that can reasonably be considered common, rather than
        from a consideration of culture as a manifold outcome of human activity. . . By
        naturalizing the concept of culture in this way, rational choice theorists forgo the ability
        to know whether common knowledge actually exists in any particular instance or
        whether another, unspecified, variable is doing the work of coordinating action. By
        tracking how common knowledge gets produced, is subject to change, or is implicated in

                                                                                                       17
        political relationships of leverage and domination, we can produce robust explanations
        of why people coordinate their actions when they do, while avoiding erroneous causal
        inferences.

        NWW present a compelling account for how constitutions acquire “self-enforcing”
properties (see also Weingast 2005), but even self-enforcing constitutions are not self-
interpreting. They note that struggles, “often violent” (NWW p. 118), are necessary to widen
open access orders to full participation by formerly excluded groups, such as racial minorities
and women. But if violence is required, it is not clear on what the political consensus is actually
based. In retrospect one knows that the U.S. Civil War, the U.S. New Deal struggles, and the
European and North American protests of the 1960s did not split those nations, but at the time
it would have been difficult to assert that a constitutional consensus existed. Their account also
assumes that rent-seeking behavior and power-grabbing typically take the form of naked
violations of constitutional tenets, rather than more subtle distortions. For instance, even
though private sector unionization is still constitutionally protected in open access orders, in
some of them organized interests have worked to transform rules governing collective
bargaining in such a way as to limit open access to the organizational form called a union, and in
so doing generate additional rents for themselves. In simplest terms, the problem is that when
NWW write that “If a group attempts to extract too much, then other groups who are not
normally active on an issue are likely to begin paying attention, with the potential to alter
dramatically the political forces on this issue and hence the outcome,” they do not explain how
anyone, either the analyst or the actors involved, know how much (and how much of what)
constitutes “too much” (NWW p. 128). Although there is insufficient space to elaborate the
argument, the same problem applies to the emergence of the norms of “impersonality” and
“equality” in the NWW account: the authors assume their existence instead of providing
evidence for them, and do not explain how they arise.
        Consider an alternative account of constitutionalism. For Hart (1961), societies and their
members know that certain rules constitute authoritative law – rather than obsolescent,
unobserved, or trivial law – on the basis of a “rule of recognition.” The rule of recognition may
include a variety of elements; in other words, when someone asks how one knows that a rule is
actually valid law, a person might point to an authoritative list of laws, a custom, the actions of a
legislature, judicial decisions or something else (Hart 1961: 101). But given this diversity of
sources of law, how does consensus arise and how is it maintained? Hart argues that in modern
                                                                                                        18
societies a law is known as law when most citizens conform to it and when legal officials
consider it valid based on their derivations of primary and secondary rules. In other words, there
is no consensus as such; instead, constitutionalism depends, in part, on the practices of
knowledge generation and dissemination by legal officials (which in turn are partly based on
their material interests), as well as the day-to-day practices of ordinary citizens.
Constitutionalism is thus understood to be a social practice.
        The advantage of this kind of account, relative to one that assumes a consensus, is that
it opens space for the analyst to describe the relationship, whether mutually supporting or
fricative, between the practices of legal officials and ordinary citizens, between the
development of interpretive communities who lay down and contest ground rules around legal
argument (Kennedy 1991), between the ways in which legal practice can generate constitutional
change, and the variety of constraints that ordinary citizens and legal officials impose on such
change. The account in NWW describes open access orders but does not explain how the belief
systems that sustain them arise. In his review of Violence and Social Orders, Bates (2010: 752-6)
laments that the book “is largely devoted to characterization and classification,” and believes
that a more explanatory book would have included more “micro-level reasoning” and given
greater attention to the strategies adopted by individual actors. We concur with this diagnosis,
but argue here that an account of coordinated social practices and intersubjective meanings
would provide additional explanatory power, and for the story of how beliefs arise and are
maintained, a stronger one.

        North, Wallis and Weingast (2009) and Hart (1961) – and, respectively, the broader
approaches they represent – thus embody rather contrasting visions of constitutionalism and
conflict, visions whose core assumptions about the status, persistence, sources of legitimacy and
change mechanisms of constitutionalism and conflict lead to correspondingly different policy
implications. The former, with its emphasis on institutional design issues and the dynamics by
which intra-elite conflicts are resolved, more readily lends itself to a policy agenda emphasizing
the reform of institutional structures and the prioritization of elite concerns, in the belief that
these realms disproportionately establish the overall “rules of the game” and incentive
structures, which in turn shape the behavior of individuals operating under them. The latter
approach, though sensitive to institutional design and incentives, emphasizes instead the
prevailing practices by which different groups – which includes, but is far from limited to, the
                                                                                                      19
elite – involved in a given issue produce, via both observable and unobservable processes,
agreements and disagreements about the reform process itself, the means by which these might
be resolved (and in what order), and mutually legitimate mechanisms for bringing about (or
resisting) change. In short, institutional form and function – what they ‘look like’ and what they
actually ‘do’ – are not necessarily axiomatic: to get the organizational functionality that is
desired, it is necessary but insufficient to focus exclusively (as much policy reform efforts do) on
institutional design issues alone. It is also important to consider the ways in which inter-group
dynamics shape what is think-able, say-able and (thus) do-able with respect to the means by
which any consensus is produced regarding the very essence of what institutions are, what their
legitimate functions should be, what issues (among many) should be prioritized, and how they
should be changed (or not).

(b) Collective Action and the Maintenance of Common Pool Resources

A pervasive challenge facing all communities, but especially poor rural communities in developing
countries, is the management of common pool resources, such as streams, fisheries and forests. This
problem is a canonical one for rational choice theorists, who struggle to explain how individuals will
contribute to the maintenance of the common resource (e.g., by regularly securing the integrity of dam
walls, checking salination levels, etc) or avoid ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (in which individual group
members over-fish or over-graze existing stocks), since the interests of individuals and the collective
seem to be radically divergent: what is optimal and thus rational for the individual – to sit back and let
others maintain the resource, while harvesting a disproportionate share of its fruits – generates, in the
long-run, a collective outcome – a neglected or barren resource – benefiting no-one.

        This problem, while real, occurs far less frequently that theory would predict; life for the billions
of poor people living in rural areas in developing countries, many of whom depend on common pool
resources for their very survival, would be impossible if it was as pervasive as theory would have us
believe. Observing this gulf between theory and behavior, a number of researchers – most famously
Elinor Ostrom (1990, 2005), who in 2009 won a Nobel Prize for her work19 – have sought to revisit the
theory. Without necessarily abandoning rationality assumptions, these scholars have highlighted the
complementary importance of social norms, produced and reinforced through repeated social practices

19
  See also, among many others, Wade (1988) and Ellickson (1993). An extensive review symposium of Ostrom’s
seminal work on common pool resource management is provided in Perspectives on Politics (2010).
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not just through small cohesive groups (as emphasized by Olson 1965) but across larger territorial space.
For example, the presence of norms giving priority to maximizing the welfare of the group (as opposed
to the individual) are often a feature of such community interactions, defying the very presumption that
the rational, utility-maximizing, self-interested individual is always and everywhere the unit of analysis
on which action is based, or should be interpreted.

        Whether at the level of the individual or group, however, for present purposes it is important to
recognize that success in the management of common pool resources turns in the first instance on
shared understandings of what effective ‘management’ means and what ultimate ends the resource’s
use is believed to serve. When UNESCO declares a particular geographical location to be a World
Heritage Site, for example, it imbues this site with a particular historical, ecological and legal status that
may or may not accord with those of its traditional users or the prevailing national government, even if
all parties nominally share a common ‘interest’ in the site’s maintenance; in such instances, the
successful ‘management’ of this common resource ultimately turns on the extent to which these parties’
rather different sources of legitimacy and authority can nonetheless come to a sufficiently shared
understanding of the problem and possible solutions, which in turn will be largely a product of social
practices (such as ongoing deliberation and equitable diplomatic relations). This is a particularly salient
issue in Vanuatu, where the ‘Chief Roy Mata Domain’ has been declared a World Heritage Site since
2008, a status explicitly sought by the government of Vanuatu as part of a package of defense
mechanisms mobilized against the predations of international commercial interests, but one that has
created additional confusion for resident villagers who regard the area as a primary basis of identity and
livelihood provision. Reconciling these disparate understandings of ‘resources’, ‘management’ and ‘the
law’ remains an ongoing struggle, one ultimately grounded in the different meanings that each group –
international agencies, regional bodies, national governments, commercial enterprises and community
groups – has of these concepts.20

        Our concern here is less with whether local community institutions are demonstrably “better”
(or “worse”) at managing such resources than states or markets, and more with the prior question of
how different stakeholder groups – with their correspondingly different understandings of what better


20
  On the details of this case, see Serrano and Stefanova (2010). See also Agrawal (2001) and especially Mansuri
and Rao (2011: chapter 5), who provide a detailed review of the empirical evidence – which they find to be
decidedly mixed – on the efficacy of community-based and decentralized approaches to managing common pool
resources. See also the important reviews provided by Agrawal et al (2009) and Ribot et al (2009).
                                                                                                              21
or worse management means – forge (or fail to forge) sufficiently common understandings of the status
of the resource, its boundaries, the purpose and mechanisms of management, jurisdictional
responsibilities, and procedures to be followed in the event of subsequent disagreement. Little of this
can be axiomatically inferred from deducing each group’s putative “interests”, size or demographic
characteristics. Even so, as Mansuri and Rao (2011) correctly conclude, it is often the nature and extent
of inequality between – and even within – stakeholder groups (contra Olson 1965), not heterogeneity
per se, and the quality of state-society relations, that is a critical determinant of success.

        Successfully bridging these otherwise broad ontological and epistemological gaps can yield
mutually beneficial outcomes. Uphoff’s (1994) account of rice production practices in a particular
community in Gal Oya, Sri Lanka, for example, shows how spectacular gains in productivity occurred
when both local farmers and external horticultural specialists found a way, through repeated dialogue
and mutually respectful interaction, to harness their different knowledge of irrigation, fertilizers, seed
placement and harvesting techniques to achieve production yields neither had been able to attain on
their own. The binding constraint here was not “interests” or “incentives” but shared intersubjective
meaning: had farmers and scientists held rigidly to their particular and preferred understanding of what
drives and constrains rice yields, a sub-optimal (as it turned out) result would have ensued. Their new
(superior) knowledge, it should be stressed, was a product of integrating two otherwise distinctive
epistemological understandings of rice production – one might crudely call them ‘science’ and ‘tradition’
(or, following Geertz, ‘local knowledge’) – each with correspondingly different intersubjective meanings
of what soil, water and seeds “are”, how they interact and their interactions adjusted to produce “rice”.
Deliberative mechanisms, in short, provided a means by which seemingly contrasting intersubjective
meanings of rice production could be reconciled for mutual benefit.

        A different but related example comes from Tsai (2007), who demonstrates how, in rural China,
the embeddedness of local officials in everyday community life can serve as an effective accountability
mechanism, ensuring that officials perform their duties as mediators of everyday disputes surrounding
common pool resources despite the fact that such officials are not democratically elected (thus facing
direct accountability to voters) and that the broader system of government itself may place a much
higher premium on party loyalty and the attainment of centrally-determined policy “targets” (such as
the number of children born) than demonstrated workplace performance as the basis for recognition
and promotion. Orthodox theories of organizations and accountability, with their narrow focus on

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material and political incentives, struggle to account for the relative effectiveness of such officials; a
different lens, one which pays closer attention to idiosyncratic contextual realities, shows that a salient
variable shaping performance can be the means by which honor is produced and upheld in interactions
between villagers and officials, a process that requires an expanded understanding of what “incentives”
mean to participants, and thus to analysts. For Tsai, it is the everyday practice of social interaction
between officials and villagers that consolidate such common understandings and (thus) nurture shared
interests and accountability; importantly, she also argues that distinctively Chinese social institutions
which are open to all (as opposed to church groups, which are restrictive by way of membership and, by
definition, place officials in an overtly religious space they are otherwise formally barred, qua an official,
from occupying) are more likely to facilitate and sustain such understandings.

        As we show below, these types of examples are instructive for policy, especially as it pertains to
the formulation of strategies linking development outcomes and rule of law reform in contexts of state
fragility and societal conflict and violence.

(c) Intersubjectivity and Donor Theory and Practice of Rule of Law Reform

(Re-)establishing the rule of law in situations of fragility and conflict is a pervasive concern for donors of
all stripes, including major multilateral institutions (World Bank 2011a; UNDP 2000; African
Development Fund 2008; European Commission 2007) and bilateral actors (DFID 2010; Dutch Ministry of
Foreign Affairs 2007; France Coopération 2007; German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and
Development 2007). These actors ascribe a range of definitional characteristics to the rule of law, have a
range of concerns – from developmental impacts, to security risks, to political or military interests – and
a concomitant range of policy approaches: some emphasize the importance of establishing basic
security, others viable mechanisms for dispute resolution, still others building the presence of the state.
As a result, it is difficult to ascribe a single unifying feature or approach to donors; nevertheless, we
make some general claims here (albeit understandably broad-brush), based on a critical understanding
of the World Development Report 2011 (World Bank 2011a), which through research and an extensive
consultation process does attempt to draw out commonalities and shared understandings in donor
approaches.

        Rule of law reformers share a fundamental axiom: that establishing and upholding the rule of
law – be it to establish law and order, enforce contracts or hold political power-holders to account - is a

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core function of the state (AusAID 2011). This is translated through NWW’s influential work; for a given
definition of the rule of law and of “institutions” (ranging from the “rules of the game” to a more
organizational understanding), donors see the rule of law as, simultaneously, an institutional value (that
is, informing process) and an institutional goal (that is, informing substance and outcomes). In other
words, institutions uphold and enforce the rule of law – institutions do, indeed, rule.

        In situations of fragility or conflict, it is thus (tautologically) understood that the state in
question is generally weak, limited or absent. As a result, the state and state institutions are unable to
uphold and enforce the rule of law to the desired level. As matter of general principle, donors seek to
provide inputs to institutions that lead to desired outputs. At the rhetorical and analytical levels, for
example, AusAid (2010) presumes that institutions themselves can be the subject of intervention. At the
operational level, phase 1 of the $27.75 million Justice Sector Reform Project in Afghanistan (World
Bank 2011b) sought to “improve” state institutions (including the Supreme Court and the Attorney-
General’s Office) through specific inputs such as human resource reform and training for officials. As a
result, we see a conceptual process of institutional reification on the part of donors: the WDR 2011, for
example, narrates a story of change that involves the transformation of institutions through engaging
with stresses and risks that act upon institutions (World Bank 2011a).

        The most evident problem, or symptom, of such an approach is the need to engage with and
mediate between different understandings of what law is – that is, what is knowable, say-able, and do-
able about the law - something which donors have been notoriously ineffective at doing (Desai and Sage
2011). This is part of what Simmons (2000: 333) sees – in the context of public international law - as a
“broader critique of social scientific methods that attribute meaning to actions, rather than allowing
these meanings to reveal themselves through intersubjective discourse.” In situations of legal or
normative pluralism – retributive versus reconciliatory approaches to the punishment of rape in Liberia
(Isser, Lubkemann and N’Tow 2009), or competing conceptions of ownership of natural resources and
legitimate methods of dispute resolution in the arid lands of Northern Kenya (Chopra 2008a; Chopra
2008b), for example – the nature of the conflict cannot be understood without recourse to background
meaning systems such as non-state justice institutions that determine issues such as the nature of and
sanction for rape. As a result, forging spaces for the development of “meta-rules” (Barron, Smith and
Woolcock 2004), or spaces in which different background meanings can engage and help generate
overarching rules governing the application of different systems, comes to the fore.

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         Yet in making a move to engage with non-state justice systems, rhetoric and analysis has often
focused on the symptom that triggers such shifts – the move away from state-centrism – rather than the
cause – the need to engage with background meaning: in other words, to see the rule of law in a
manner parallel to a Kuhnian approach to the natural sciences – an “intersubjective, interpretive project
*+ that does not involve detached and neutral investigations” (Mootz 1993: 253). As an example of the
symptom/cause disjunct, the WDR 2011 reflects on lessons learned from practice and finds that it is
important to engage with non-state mechanisms because they may prove more effective than the state
at maintaining social cohesion at the community level.21

         The logic of this approach has important emerging implications for development policy and
practice: institutions of the rule of law are reified objects, rather than indivisibly embedded and
recreated in social practice. As a result, they are still subject to an input-> output model of reform, but
one that resituates the locus of reform from individual institutions to whole systems (World Bank
2011a). Taking this logic one step further, given that individuals are not agents in the contestation and
definition of institutions, the success of these inputs and outputs can be measured (if we presume a
methodological individualism and a stylized public choice approach to policy) based on the choice to use
these institutions: in other words, individuals can be consumers but do not (re-)define the institution
through social practice. As a result, for some theory (and the donor practice it influences), competition is
king: Botero et al (2003) adopt such an approach to present a model of judicial reform, for example, that
argues for “incentive-oriented reform… to increase accountability, competition and choice” between
legal institutions and between judges; this is reiterated by Cabrillo and Fitzpatrick (2008: 58) and
extended to the provision of legal services (232). At the level of practice, Barendrecht and de Vries
(2005) highlight ADR – including non-state justice systems – as a means to foster “innovation” and
generate healthy competition in the market for legal services. We do not argue that all donor policy and
practice in the field of rule of law reform is underpinned by a belief in competition between institutions;
rather, this is the logical extension of an approach that reifies institutions and removes them from the
meaning systems that generate, contest and redefine them continuously.

         If we presume that within the parameters of a competition-based approach the state is still the
ultimate object of desire as regards rule of law interventions in fragile or conflict-affected settings

21
  It is important to note that the WDR 2011 also sees these institutions as potential “best fit”: that is, apt to the
context. We extend this analysis here, arguing for an enriched understanding of “context” to account for
intersubjective meaning systems.
                                                                                                                        25
(Ghani, Lockhart and Carnahan 2005), we are then presented with the following dynamic: donors may
seek to engage in contexts marked by fragility and social fracture by establishing competing institutional
systems of the rule of law and letting the users decide, the presumption being that the systems that
provide better outcomes will be those of the state. Such an approach is in clear contrast to the context-
and process-driven one that gave rise to the need to establish meta-rules in fragile settings, which
recognizes the need to build bridges between competing meaning systems rather than allow
competition to take its course: the fundamental disjuncture around intersubjective or reified institutions
gives rise to “competition versus cohesion”.

        Phase 2 of the Justice Sector Reform Project in Afghanistan, which is currently under
development and is the subject of continued modification (World Bank 2011b), is evolving in a fashion
that reflects this tension. An aspect of the design under discussion is a “partnership for justice” to
improve the delivery of legal services, which recognizes the socially-generated legitimacy of non-state
institutions and avoids direct engagement in order not to undermine them, preferring instead to carry
out a range of analyses in order better to understand them and their impact on the formal system. At
the same time, it attempts to build links between the formal and informal systems of justice, as the
project’s main purpose is to create a local system capable of meeting demand for service, requiring
harmonization of inputs. According to current thinking on the project, the benefit of this harmonization
is that people can experience both systems, the presumption being that, as the two systems are
juxtaposed and compete for “users”, people will begin to choose an improving formal system as it
leverages its scale and backing of the state (thereby fitting in with the Afghan government’s overall
justice strategy).

        The tensions reflected in phase 2 of the Afghanistan project reflect the idea that the tension in
donor approaches to the rule of law outlined above becomes less a question of technique and more one
of political theory and appropriate underlying political order. The approach laid out in the foregoing
sections of this paper stresses “the intersubjectivity of meaning, the significance of our communal
identity to our personal identity and the interrelationship of people, rather than their autonomy,
detachment, and antagonism” (Massaro 1989: 2121). While we do not seek to be prescriptive in
identifying one correct approach, we certainly assert that analyses of the rule of law would be enriched
by accounting for intersubjective meaning systems, thereby structuring more effective operations.



                                                                                                          26
           For example, a World Bank Institutional and Governance Review of Honduras (World Bank 2009:
23-26) highlights inefficiencies, corruption and capture in the judiciary, which forms part of a broader
narrative of capture and clientelism across all branches of the state. However, an understanding of the
histories of violent conflict in Honduras can shed a different light on the provenance of such behavior,
and situate in a set of broader intersubjective meanings shared and contested amongst (parts of)
society. Honduras, under the influence of private and state actors and a key route for control of the
banana trade, suffered from civil and transnational violent conflict through the first half of the 20th
century, and was repeatedly occupied by American troops during this period (Langley 2002: 170-186). At
the same time, there was aggressive action by banana companies to undermine collective labor
movements, moving thousands of workers of different ethnicities from one country to another to
saturate labor markets and reduce wages (Bourgois 1989: 217; Euraque 2002: 240-2). In the Honduran
context, the notion that patron-client relations are intersubjectively understood as providing security
and safety, rather than simply being an issue of corruption, allows collective action problems to be
reconceptualized in light of historical contingencies. Such an understanding would undermine a
competition-based approach to reform – people are unlikely to flock to the “best-“performing
institutions but will rather stay within the safe confines of neopatrimonial networks - and opens the
door for policy and programming based on security concerns rather than or alongside governance and
anti-corruption interventions.




    III.      Conclusions and Implications for Analysis, Policy and Programs

In this paper we have argued that current understandings and analyses of collective action are limited,
emphasizing reified institutions and the incentives and information that structure action around them.
This is particularly true of fragile and conflict-affected contexts, which cannot be fully understood
without reference to their social and historical production. We have used examples of collective action
around common pool environmental resources, and collective use of (and subordination to) rule of law
institutions in situations of fragility, conflict and violence to demonstrate the analytic and explicatory
bounds of such an approach.

           Specifically, we have sought to show that the concept of “intersubjective meanings” – shared
understandings that give rise to shared meaning systems – is essential for understanding the social

                                                                                                             27
dimensions of collective action, particularly in fragile contexts. This extends to the social and historical
contingencies of collective action problems, which are constitutive of these meaning systems. As a
result, we can now draw out a series of seven recommendations that might inform development actors
in responding to collective action problems in such difficult contexts.

Analytic

     1) This approach opens up a range of conceptual spaces, founded on the need to enquire into
           “common understandings” in a given social order. Analysts of collective action can engage with
           these in order to understand what ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ mean for given people in given
           contexts. These spaces are multidisciplinary, taking in (inter alia) anthropology, history,
           sociology and even law as elucidatory of background understandings (Bamberger et al 2009;
           Lasser et al 1999; Kennedy 1985).

     2) This approach broadens the range of institutional spaces for analysis. Analyses should also
           engage with institutions that generate and shape common understandings. This implies giving
           greater sensitivity to spaces in which such understandings are forged, contested and reformed,
           including the media, legal/dispute resolution institutions, religious groups, educational
           organizations, government communication departments, etc.

     3) By implication, the analyst must engage with two reflexive spaces. First, the analyst must be
           sensitive to the ways in which her understanding of the world is intersubjectively constructed
           and the possibilities of intersubjective dissonance with the subjects of analysis.22 Second, the
           analyst must be sensitive to the role of the donor or development agency as active intervener,
           creating (as much as responding to) the contexts in which it works.

Policy

     4) To be able to provide policy recommendations, it is important to understand the relationships
           between institutions and intersubjective meaning – the extent to which each channel generates
           or frames the other. For example, is budgeting a national or local issue? Is healthcare an




22
  This insight is not new: for a recent treatment of this matter (including methodological individualism and
intersubjectivity) and an attempt to introduce a new research framework, see Gillespie and Cornish (2010).
                                                                                                               28
        entitlement? Is education for girls a necessity or a luxury? What standards of conduct are
        expected from justice sector officials?

    5) Policy needs to expand its ambit to concern itself with spaces for the generation, consumption
        and development of intersubjective meaning. For example, moving towards a concern with
        equity and participation in education or the ownership structures of the media.

Programs

    6) Programs that allow common understandings to be brought out and engaged with need to be
        designed alongside technical interventions. This might include communicative or performative
        interaction, including theatre, the radio and television (Harter et al 2007).

    7) “Peer-educators” (Bayly 2004), who are able to vernacularize the global and translate vernacular
        understandings, become essential to programming, foregrounding intersubjective
        understandings and linking them to development aspirations (Woolcock et al 2011).




We do not mean to suggest that collective action problems are purely an issue of socially-constituted
understanding. Political economy accounts of institutions, the rule of law, fragility, and common pool
resources, which emphasize individual incentives, commitment problems, and asymmetric information,
remain powerful for understanding why certain events happen when they do, and why some observed
equilibria (good and bad) are difficult to change. However, by pointing to the background set of
meanings that help constitute the actions available to individual actors, we seek to open up spaces for
more nuanced analysis, policy and programs that may lead to more effective pathways to attaining
development outcomes.




                                                                                                          29
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