PROMOTING THE SUSTAINABILITY OF DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTIONS - A FRAMEWORK FOR STRATEGY

This article presents a generic framework for understanding institutional sustainability in development. Its lessons draw from the agriculture and health sectors. The framework treats institutions as: (a) systems that function in relationship to their environments; (b) organized and managed entities whose organizational structures and procedures must match the tasks, products, people, resources, and contexts they deal with; and (c) settings intimately concerned with the exchange of resources where economic and political relationships intertwine to create varying patterns of power and incentive. Application of the analytic framework has shown that institutional sustainability depends upon maintaining: responsive output flows (high quality and valued goods and services); cost-effective goods and services delivery mechanisms (organization and management); and resource flows (recurrent costs, capital investments, human resources).