A new perspective on institutional change

Power is an inescapable aspect of institutional change, but theoretically, its role is not always clear or even acknowledged.

This working paper assuages this by presenting a novel, explicitly power-based perspective on institutional change. It offers both a theoretical consideration of how power-infused strategies, systems and knowledge drive institutional change as well as an account of how a power-based analysis could look in practice.

In it, a foucauldian-inspired account of power provides a theoretical foundation where disparate institutional change theories are located and combined. This allows not only for an explicit consideration of power in change, but also creates space for more rigorous analyses of institutional change, based not on the confines of a single institutional change theory, but on the complex realities of power and change in practice.