Moscow-based INDEM (Information Science for Democracy) Foundation is one of the first Russian NGOs founded in 1990. As a part of its anti-corruption work, INDEM set out to analyze the state of the judicial system in Russia given the country’s checkered experience with judicial reform.
In this Feature Service article, Georgi Satarov, president of the INDEM Foundation, presents the findings of this analysis. Although derived from the Russian experience, the findings represent broader lessons learned from the systemic transition that can be applied to any institutional reforms.
He concludes, “All of these lessons point in one direction. In trying to jump-start reforms in Russia from the 1990s to today, reformers have failed to make a proper distinction between the bottom-up evolution of institutions, which happens in effective democracies, and often ineffectual top-down design of institutions, which fails to account for the extra-institutional country environment.”
Article at a Glance
- How institutions evolve and their relationship to the environment in which they function is poorly understood.
- Institutions are influenced by both their design and extra-institutional factors such as a country’s operating environment.
- Rule of law rather than quality of regulation is the most important aspect of countries’ institutional development.
Published Date: June 03, 2010