From Taking the Rules of the Game Seriously: Mainstreaming Justice in Development in the World Bank’s Justice for the Poor Program:
Beyond just correcting failures in the conception and practice of justice-sector reform work, development needs to address the larger issue that most development processes fail to even consider rules systems,9 despite the routine invocation of popular expressions endorsing the importance of “understanding the rules of the game.” Rules underpin all aspects of everyday life and are the key to understanding how conflicts form, escalate, or get resolved. Yet, development, by design, puts all these rules systems in flux; it reorders society and alters the distribution of rights, responsibilities, and resources. Moreover, it alters social relations, especially those pertaining to gender, occupation, and the relative political strength of particular social groups. As such, it is inherently accompanied by conflict. By establishing legitimate spaces and processes for negotiating competing interests, aspirations, and interpretations, development actors can potentially become part of the solution to such conflicts.
