Structural Depth
The utilization of correct principles plays a key role in effective transitions. This is because wise principles faithfully honored have high structural value. In complex environments – even chaotic ones – principles can have powerful ordering and integrating effects, counter-acting the disruptive influence of confusion and providing actionable clarity.
Because some principles ‘travel well’ there is an understandable tendency to re-purpose them in settings quite different from the soil they emerged from. When they are unwisely transplanted, however, actual jeopardy to the organization's stability and progress can result. An illustration of this on a large scale is regulatory reform in post-conflict societies.
For a post-conflict society aspiring to democracy, political legitimacy is viewed as requiring the instantiation of the principle of freedom of expression, and the influence of ‘free and independent’ media is viewed as a sine qua non for its establishment. The relationship between democracy, freedom of expression, and democratic media is well-fixed in collective thought. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right – respect for which is viewed as affecting the exercise of most other basic rights – and is guaranteed in a vast number of international legal documents and national constitutions. At the level of the European Union as well as within its member states, freedom of expression and ‘free and independent’ media are taken to be the predicate principles of media regulatory systems in a democracy.
As critical to democracy as freedom of expression and the creation of ‘free and independent’ media are, the naïve introduction of media into a newly formed democracy, particularly one with a history of ethnic conflict, has seldom achieved eo ipso the desired democratizing effects. Historic illustrations of this problem abound. For example, during the initial wave of democratic transitions that began in 1989, the introduction of media institutions into nascent democracies was widely viewed as integrally related to economic reform. The transplantation of media frameworks proceeded on the basis of neo-liberal thinking that causally linked the advance of markets to desired political, economic, and social change, and viewed the proliferation of privately-owned media as a vital and reliable step to that end. In recent years, the scope of the geo-political utility of media reform has been expanded to other areas – for example, media’s potential role in peace-building. Nonetheless, the a priori supposition that the introduction of privately-held media into transitional democracies can be counted on to ignite positive and predictable change continues to inform the practices of major development actors.
When principles effective in one arena are ineffective or harmful in another, a common reason is inadequate structural depth. The realization of any projected state of affairs always depends on the emergence of patterns of probability that enlarge as the transition unfolds. The ordering of prior states of affairs carries forward the structure that eventually becomes the realized sphere - 'real' because that sphere can be counted on to offer and uphold the particular causal dynamics that made it appealing in the first place. But for that evolution to eventuate, the structure transmitted must be of adequate quality - meaning, among other things, that its elements and relations must be configured to prosper in the climates of the transition-path. A talisman like 'freedom of expression, and free and independent media' lacks that quality - it is too superficial; its trans-planting in the new environment cannot but be too shallow. Lacking adequate structural depth, the principle will falter in the winds of disruption that complex environments spawn.
An important aspect of Design is to consider the structural quality needed to sustain expanding patterns of probability through the course of a transition, and to fashion structural forms suited to those journeys. Pragmatics offers a framework for accomplishing this.