No.17 Legitimacy-driven organisations: How can we manage them for better results?

  • #Policy Notes
  • Sociological neo-institutionalism asserts that aid-recipient and development organisations need to demonstrate their legitimacy in their institutional environment to survive. Because this legitimacy-driven nature is hard to change, development cooperation practitioners would be wise to do their work based on this assertion.
  • Although aid recipients need to follow the guidelines and regulations of aid providers, complying with them may violate their own rules. Recipients may unavoidably adopt them merely ceremonially (or superficially) to balance them. In such cases, development cooperation practitioners should not uncritically blame their ceremonial (or superficial) actions.
  • Forms of practices are transferable. However, their meanings are not because they are influenced by the culture and norms of the recipient society. Development cooperation practitioners should accept the changing meanings of transferred practices.
  • Development cooperation practitioners should consider using a decoupling strategy to circumvent the adverse effects of their organisations’ legitimacy-driven behaviour. For example, they may decouple their activities from those prescribed in a logframe to produce better outcomes.
  • Foreign reginal offices of development cooperation agencies cover multiple host countries and are placed in conditions of ‘institutional multiplicity’. Development cooperation practitioners of these offices need to rely on qualified local representatives to demonstrate organisational legitimacy in these countries.

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Author
Fushimi Katsutoshi
Date of issuance
December 2025
Number of pages
7
Topics
  • #Politics and Governance
Research area
Development Cooperation Strategies
Research project
  • Countermeasures to Institutional Duality: Cases of Bilateral Development Cooperation Agency’s Overseas Offices