Dr Alice Sindzingre,Research Fellow at the French public agency for research (CNRS, Paris), presented her research on institutions, hierarchies and membership and the links with development in Africa and Asia.

The event sought to explore the following:

• What the concept of‘institution’ exactly refers to, analysing the key features of institutions, including group memberships, hierarchies, and the capacity to regulate exchange.
• What the consequences of different types of institutions are, arguing while ‘membership’ institutions inherently lead to inequality and exclusion, social interactions may also be regulated by altruistic norms.
• How institutions change and evolve,  explaining how institutions may get ‘trapped’ in a particular structure by self-reinforcement and may need an impersonal, autonomous, third party, for transformative change.