Institutions are usually treated as actors. We ask what they intend, what they decide, whom they serve. Governments fail, universities betray their mission, courts uphold injustice, corporations behave badly. The implicit assumption is that institutions act, and could act otherwise if only they chose to.
This framing misleads us at precisely the point where global coordination becomes most opaque.
Institutions are not primarily agents. They are sedimented solutions to past coordination problems — solutions that have hardened into structure and continue to organise behaviour long after their original rationale has disappeared.
From Solution to Structure
Every institution begins as an answer to a problem:
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How do we stabilise exchange?
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How do we coordinate authority?
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How do we reproduce expertise?
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How do we manage risk over time?
At the moment of emergence, the solution is provisional, contingent, and revisable. It works well enough under specific historical conditions. Over time, however, three things happen simultaneously:
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The solution becomes standardised.
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The standard becomes infrastructural.
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The infrastructure becomes invisible.
What once required justification now requires compliance.
At this point, the institution no longer solves the original problem — it defines what counts as a problem in the first place.
Why Institutions Resist Change
Institutional inertia is often attributed to conservatism, corruption, or cowardice. While these may be present, they are not the primary drivers. Institutions resist change because they are coordination stabilisers, not belief systems.
They lock in:
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Decision pathways
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Temporal rhythms
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Accountability structures
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Resource flows
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Legitimate forms of action
To change an institution is not to persuade it, but to reconfigure the coordination ecology it stabilises. This is vastly harder than reform rhetoric suggests, because any serious change threatens the very predictability that allows large-scale coordination to function at all.
Institutions do not optimise for justice, truth, or flourishing. They optimise for continuity under uncertainty.
Institutional Morality Is Retrospective
Most institutional ethics operates backward-looking. Responsibility is assigned after failure: inquiries, reviews, resignations, apologies. These rituals reassure us that the system is morally responsive.
But this is theatre.
Institutional harm is rarely the result of transgression. It is the result of normal functioning under outdated constraints. The harm arises not because rules were broken, but because they were followed too well, for too long, in a world that had already changed.
From within the institution, deviation looks irresponsible. From outside, continuity looks pathological.
Both perceptions are correct.
Why Reform So Often Backfires
Reform typically targets surface variables: leadership, policy language, reporting mechanisms. But institutions are organised around deep coordination commitments that remain untouched.
As a result, reform is often metabolised as:
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New metrics that intensify existing pressures
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New compliance regimes that increase rigidity
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New narratives that preserve old pathways
The institution appears to change while its coordination logic becomes more entrenched.
This is why well-intentioned reforms so often worsen the very problems they claim to address. The system adapts, not by transforming, but by closing ranks around its stabilising function.
Institutions at Planetary Scale
At global scale, institutions no longer merely stabilise coordination — they couple multiple systems together: finance, law, energy, information, security. This coupling amplifies their effects and multiplies their inertia.
A trade institution shapes climate outcomes. A financial institution shapes migration patterns. A technological standard shapes political possibility. No single institution controls the whole — yet each contributes to a coordination lock-in that none can undo alone.
This is why institutional responsibility becomes diffuse without becoming negligible.
The Ethical Reframe
If institutions are fossilised coordination, then ethical engagement cannot be limited to critique, reform, or capture. These approaches assume agency where there is structure.
A relational ethics of institutions asks different questions:
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What coordination problem did this institution originally solve?
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What constraints does it now stabilise?
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What futures does it make easier — and which does it foreclose?
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Where does revisability still exist, if anywhere?
Ethical responsibility begins not with blame, but with diagnosis of coordination role.
The Dangerous Illusion
Perhaps the most dangerous illusion of all is the belief that institutions can save us at planetary scale. This fantasy displaces responsibility upward, toward structures that are structurally incapable of reconfiguration at the speed now required.
Institutions can stabilise. They can slow collapse. They can manage decline.
They cannot, by themselves, reopen possibility.
That task falls elsewhere — in the interstices between institutions, at the edges of coordination fields, where new pathways can begin to form without immediately fossilising.
That is where we turn next.
In Post 3, we examine leverage without control: how small shifts in standards, interfaces, and defaults can reconfigure global coordination without requiring consensus, capture, or revolution.
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