NARANJA: EL PARADIGMA LOGRO

While belonging to a community and set of organisations, human beings are always under the influence of rules (either state regulations or established, agreed-upon local arrangements) and norms often taken for granted. Researchers have questioned how arrangements become rules and/or norms, whether new ones replace old ones and whether rules and/or norms have the same effect on the behaviour of all individuals. This section explores the nature and characteristics of institutions. The concept of institutions has gained significant attention in the scientific world because of its capacity to understand human behaviour. Since the 1990s, the mainstream institutionalism school led by Elinor Ostrom has become popular and applied widely in irrigation management. This school of thought holds that

Institutions are human-constructed constraints or opportunities within which individual choices take place and which shape the consequences of their choices. (McGinnis 2011, cited in Cleaver 2012:11)

This school posits that rational choices drive human behaviour, which has formed the foundation for such concepts as Hardin’s tragedy of the commons and the prisoners’ dilemma (Ostrom 1990). According to this school of thought, individuals tend to purposefully act in their own interests and self-consciously craft institutions ‘to change the structure of repetitive situations that they

themselves face in an attempt to improve the outcomes that they achieve’ (Ostrom 2005, cited in Cleaver

2012:12). The belief in rational choices creates incentive for promoting designed institutions.

In this approach, people’s rationality is seen as ‘bounded’, their strategizing being limited by their ability to obtain and process the necessary information, particularly about the trustworthiness of others. This gives a role for properly designed institutions in which the operation of rules provides individuals with an assurance that others will use the natural resource in agreed ways, or be sanctioned’. (emphasise in the

original; Cleaver 2012:12)

According to the mainstream institutionalism school, resources can be better managed by reforming policy, building capacity, and redesigning community-level institutions to provide incentives for co-operate (Varughese and Ostrom 2001, Heikkila et al. 2011, cited in Cleaver 2012). Policy-makers have favoured this view because of its potential to bridge neo-liberal

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economic ideas and the desirability of decentralised local management and ownership (Ostrom 1990).

However, scholars from critical institutionalism argue that achieving the expected outcomes by managing human behaviour through designed institutions is not easy because individuals can perceive and translate rational choice and its importance differently. Cleaver (2012:xiii) argues that although designed institutions have potential, the inherently social nature of institutional functioning hinders the effectiveness of the strategy. This school emphasises the complexity of institutions entwined in every social life, their evolving historical formation driven by social and economic changes over time, and the interplay between global and local factors, the traditional and the modern, and between formal and informal arrangements (Mosse 1997, Cleaver 2001, Lund 2006, all cited in Cleaver 2012:8-9). ‘Rules, boundaries and processes are “fuzzy”; people’s complex

social identities and unequal power relationships shape resource management arrangements and outcomes’

(Cleaver 2012:8-9). Scholars from this school offer various definitions of institutions: ‘Institutions

are neither animate things nor agents –they only exist in relation to people’s interactions with one another. It is people, through their behavior and social relationships, who animate institutions’. (ibid:43). They are ‘not being designed or crafted; [they] are patched together, consciously and not consciously, from the social cultural and political resources available to people based on the logic of dynamic adaptation (Smith at el. 2001:42)’ (ibid:15).

‘Institutions arrangement shape the way people manage material natural resources and infrastructure which is then

influence the social arrangement to manage’. (Cleaver 2012:20).

In resources management, institutions are shaped both deliberately in formal spaces (which are to varying degrees public and formal; e.g. committees, associations, user groups, burial societies) and less consciously in routinised daily interactions (embodied in kinship and social networks, relations of reciprocity and patronage and sets of norms and practices deeply rooted in the habits and routine of everyday life). Overall, the critical school argues that crafting or designing institutions which achieved planned outcomes is impossible because institutions are formed, changed and reformulated through dynamic processes which play out in very different forms in varying contexts and, therefore, elude design (Franks and Cleaver 2007).

To overcome the ‘myth’ of local governance as ‘good’, traditional arrangements that do not produce social equality, Cleaver (1999:603) suggests eliminating the belief in that socially embedded institutions are ‘better’ than formal/organisational ones as local practices might uphold and reproduce locally specific configurations of inequity and exclusion. Sharing this view, Meinzen-Dick and Nkonya (2007:14), water scholars studying African and Asian countries, argue

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that the pluralism of water institutions increased because of the plural characteristics of different kinds of law: state, customary and religious. While recognising the importance of local rules and norms in guiding decisions, Meinzen-Dick and Nkonya (2007:23) intentionally do not romanticise customary systems because they can reflect unequal power relationships in local communities, frequently dominated by local elites. Unless local rules and norms are analysed in relation to a specific group of people in society, judgments of whether these local designs are good or bad is relative.

Within the school of critical institutionalism, Cleaver recommends a metaphor for understanding institutions: bricolage. As bricolage, institutions are formed from pre-existing resources in order to make similar but new forms of institutions to guide practice at certain times. This metaphor highlights the role of institutions in consciously and unconsciously forming and changing rules and norms which are kept, returned or changed. Throughout this dissertation, institutional bricolage helps explain the arrangements for field drainage and canal dredging selected by state and local agents. The characteristics of institutional bricolage are clarified and explored in those empirical accounts. Institutions in local irrigation management in the Mekong Delta are proven to be a cocktail of modern and traditional, formal and informal constantly negotiated in the quest for legitimacy.

The state appears as a stakeholder involving in the interactions that make up the institutional process. Thus, analysing the negotiation process can reveal the state’s roles and relation to other agents in society. The following section presents various views of the state in contemporary Vietnam and introduces the concept of everyday dialogue, which this research demonstrates is the conceptual foundation for the interaction of state and society. Finally, this section describes the analytical framework based on Göbel (2011) concept of power dimensions of which is used to discuss these interactions at the bureaucratic–informal interface.

2.2. Identifying the Vietnamese state’s roles and status at the bureaucratic–informal