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This paper from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) argues that development interventions are more likely to succeed if they promote improvements at the wider level of institutions.

Institutions are very powerful and often discriminate against the poor. Without institutional reform poverty alleviation programmes can fail. The purpose of these DFID guidelines is to help the reader to identify the relationship between organisations and the institutional environment in which they operate. This includes identifying institutional problems that prevent improvement at the organisational level. The guidelines also provide information on how to promote the necessary changes in both institutions and organisations.

The guidelines identify the following features of the institutional framework in which development organisations operate:

• Institutional development is a complex process which needs to draw from and build on local realities.
• It is important to establish the development outcomes of any proposed institutional change.
• It is critical to distinguish between the organisational changes and the changes in the wider institutional framework needed to achieve these outcomes. Organisational problem are usually visible and tangible while those to do with institutions may be invisible but determine how people operate in society.
• The dynamics of institutional change are complex. Creating institutional change is a slow difficult process and change can often meet with resistance.
• It is necessary to be clear on the difference between the symptoms and underlying causes of institutional problems and poor performance.

The guidelines also outline the key stages in the design and implementation of interventions aimed at producing institutional and organisational change. These include:

• Identifying and distinguishing between institutional and organisational interventions. Institutional interventions can be divided into two areas: policy reform and improved service delivery. Organisational interventions can be at three levels: structure, systems and human resources
• Encouraging the active participation of all the stakeholders in diagnosing the problems to be tackled and deciding on the actions to be taken. In particular it is important to enable the poor to say what their needs are
• Accessing important sources of information and research material to inform both the institutional and organisational appraisal
• Identifying the key people in implementing the intervention along with their roles and responsibilities. The key roles include: the programme manager or advisor; the change sponsor; the change agents and the change participants
• Designing an effective strategy and programme for implementation of the planned intervention, and taking action if a programme becomes stalled
• Putting effective evaluation and monitoring systems in place so that there will be clear evidence that the goals of the intervention have been achieved.

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