Local Governance in Timor-Leste - Secretaria de Estado da Arte e ...

expanded this understanding to include other forces that were previously the domainof behaviouralists—redefined as informal institutions. This theoretical shift hasresulted in a definition of institutions that extends beyond formal bureaucraticinstitutions and broadly includes "enduring regularities of human interaction infrequently occurring or repetitive situations structured by rules, norms and sharedstrategies, as well as by the physical world" (Crawford and Ostrom, 2000: 114).A central focus of new institutionalism is therefore to analyse the variousrelationships between formal and informal institutions as they combine and interact toproduce societal outcomes. There have emerged quite different schools of thoughtwithin new institutionalist thought to explain these interactions, which are generallydivided according to their disciplinary foundations (Thelen, 1999: 369-70). These arerational choice institutionalism (North, 1990) that is linked to the modernisationtheorists, sociological institutionalism (March and Olsen, 1989) that is linked to thebehaviouralists, and historical institutionalism (Hall and Taylor, 1998a) thatemphasises the historical embeddedness and path dependency of institutions. Whilethere is theoretical overlap between these different schools and there are variousscholars who have worked to bridge the divides between them, there remain someimportant differences within the different approaches (Hall and Taylor, 1998a,Immergut, 1998, Kato, 1996). As these differences have been explored within andbetween schools, it is apparent that the ontological divide between institutionalistsand behaviouralists has not disappeared and it now expresses itself in the differentapproaches of new institutionalism, as each of these schools tend to representdifferent approaches to the social ontological divide between structure and agency(Hay and Wincott, 1998, Hall and Taylor, 1998a: 939). While rational choice theoristshave been concerned with how a political and economic environment can be shapedthrough the creation of laws and policies that will find the right traction within asociety (see for example Riker, 1980, Ostrom, 1990, Calvert, 1995), sociologicalinstitutionalists have concerned themselves with questions of how culture works andthe rules that evolve to structure interactions within a society (see for example Marchand Olsen, 1989, Meyer and Rowan, 1991). Although there has been some crossfertilisation(see for example Fligstein, 1997, Bates and Weingast, 1995), thesedifferent disciplinary approaches have developed relatively independently from each58