Institutional Innovation and the Steering of Conflicts in Latin America

This book opens the institutional Pandora's box of conflict management, focusing on two central questions: To what degree do Latin American political contexts create spaces for institutional designs that deal with conflicts in a feasible and legitimate way? What processes enable institutional architects to exploit such space to manage conflict innovatively? The authors' point of departure is that institutions are primarily conflict-solving entities guiding individual and social behaviour, and that they set out to be much more than rules of the game: institutions do (and should) evolve and are eventually redesigned to meet human necessities. In light of the pending socioeconomic challenges in most of Latin America, institutional designers are confronted with the fact that nothing inherent within the institutions guarantees that conflict is processed in ways that tackle distributive and ethnic inequalities.