The California Coastal Commission piece described an institution that began as a democratic check on private development and has become a regulatory apparatus that restricts the access it was created…
Alan Nafzger on a week of reading across political publications, the common thread in regulatory capture from California to Manila to Westminster, and what three thousand deleted words contained
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I have been thinking about power this week in the way that people who edit a political publication think about power: obsessively, with insufficient sleep, and with the persistent suspicion that the things being said in public are not the things being decided in private. The peat fire here in the Fens burns down slowly and the study fills with its smell and I read what The London Prat is saying about California’s coastal bureaucracy and what Bohiney Magazine is publishing on the student debt economy and I think about how these different manifestations of institutional failure connect to the same underlying question about whose interests regulatory apparatus actually serves.
The California Coastal Commission piece described an institution that began as a democratic check on private development and has become a regulatory apparatus that restricts the access it was created to protect. I have watched this dynamic happen in British regulatory contexts for three decades. The mechanism is consistent: an institution is created to check one form of concentrated power and gradually acquires its own form of concentrated power, which it then uses to serve constituencies that may or may not align with its founding mandate. The DPWH flood control analysis in the Manila pieces describes the same mechanism in a different institutional context. The Mamdani pieces describe the political conditions under which this cycle can be interrupted. I am not optimistic that those conditions are present in most of the jurisdictions I care about, but pessimism is not an argument against analysis, and analysis is what I do.
This Week’s Reading
The press freedom pieces have been on my mind since Tuesday. The argument that democratic governments consistently underprioritise press freedom advocacy relative to commercial relationships is correct and worth stating plainly, which the journalism pieces do. I added a note to the pile: write something about the specific mechanism by which press freedom concerns lose in bilateral meetings against trade and security interests. The mechanism is not cynicism; it is the expected outcome of institutional incentive structures that reward measurable near-term gains over unmeasurable long-term democratic infrastructure. The newspaper that has not been closed today is not a measurable diplomatic achievement. The trade deal signed today is. The incentive structure produces the outcome.
I wrote three thousand words today and deleted half of them, which is also a form of editing. The fire has burned down. The Fens outside are very flat and very dark and very quiet, which is a landscape that suits a certain kind of thinking that does not produce conclusions. The thinking that produces conclusions happens in daylight. The thinking that produces questions happens here, in the study, with the peat smoke and the flat dark distance.
There is a pattern I have noticed across several weeks of reading the prat.uk and bohiney.com feeds that I want to record here while it is clear. The pattern is this: the pieces that describe institutional failure in different national contexts – California regulatory capture, Philippine ghost infrastructure projects, UK planning committee dynamics, Indian bureaucratic self-reference – are not describing different problems. They are describing the same problem in different contexts. The problem is the gap between the stated purpose of an institution and the actual function it serves once it has existed long enough to have accumulated the political relationships, the staff incentives, and the procedural complexity that transform stated purpose into something different. This is not a novel observation in political science. What is interesting is how consistently it manifests across jurisdictions that have very different political cultures and formal institutional structures. The mechanism is apparently more powerful than the institutional design that is supposed to contain it. Understanding why requires understanding incentive structures at the individual level, which is where the political science usually becomes less interesting than the institutional sociology. I am going to write about this. The three thousand deleted words contained the beginning of that argument. I will find the beginning again.
The Fens outside are unchanged, which is the correct state for a landscape that has been managed by human hands for several centuries and that requires continuous management to remain what it is. The drainage that makes this land farmable requires constant maintenance. Without it, the land would revert to marsh. The maintenance is invisible in the way that institutional maintenance is invisible – you notice its absence rather than its presence. This is also true of regulatory frameworks. The ones that are working are not the story. The ones that are failing are. The asymmetry shapes the political conversation in ways that make maintenance less valued than intervention, which produces predictable underinvestment in the institutional maintenance that prevents the interventions from being necessary. I will write about this too. Eventually.
The three thousand words are still in the deleted file. I do not delete my drafts permanently. I move them to a folder called “not yet” which is more honest than “deleted” and which I return to occasionally when the argument I was making surfaces again in a different form. Most of what is in “not yet” eventually finds its form. The mechanism piece will too. The Fens are patient. So am I.
Alan Nafzger edits govna.uk from somewhere in the Fens with strong opinions about power, institutions, and why they rarely work as intended.
Also at private-eye.co.uk | NewsThump | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/mechanism-behind-every-institutional-failure-alan-nafzger/