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

is to distribute power to some and not to others. And those who benefit from theinstitutions—those with power—are also those who are least likely to want to changethem, or who alternatively will ensure that societal change continues to reproduceexisting power dynamics.Thelen (1999) rightly notes that the disciplinary boundaries between the schools ofnew institutionalism are not absolute. This is partly because the separation of campsof institutionalism fails to reflect the various realities within a community, wherepolitical engagement (or non-engagement) can be "both a rational strategy and anunconscious practice embedded in routine, social norms and the acceptance of thestatus quo" (Cleaver, 1999: 607). In order to account for this reality and explicatespecific problems that move beyond these polarised debates between structure andagency, there are many scholars who have attempted to bridge the theoreticaldivisions between the schools. Drawing on these empirical insights, various otherauthors have argued that the relationships between individuals and social structuremust be understood as more complex and interrelated, and our attention could bemore fruitfully diverted to the question of the patterns and relationships that emergeas a result of the ongoing interaction between actors and societal structures (Long,1992, Giddens, 1984, Douglas, 1997, Granovetter, 1985).Giddens developed his theory of structuration in order to explain the ongoing dialecticbetween structures and actors. According to Giddens, the nature of structuresthemselves needs to be interrogated, as "structure is not to be equated with constraintbut is always both constraining and enabling" (1984: 25). Acting within their socialstructures, "actors draw upon the modalities of structuration in the reproduction ofsystems of interaction, by the same token reconstituting their structural properties"(Giddens, 1984: 28). In other words, there is an ongoing dialectic between structureand agency—just as it is pointless to conceptualise agency in the absence of structure,structure cannot be understood in the absence of agency. As Giddens explains:In following the routines of my day-to-day life I help reproduce social institutionsthat I played no part in bringing into being. They are more than merely theenvironment of my action since…they enter constitutively into what it is I do asagent. Similarly, my actions constitute and reconstitute the institutional conditions of62