Infrastructures are complex networks dominated by tight interdependencies between technologies and institutions. These networks supply services crucial to modern societies, services that can be provided only if several critical functions are fulfilled. This book proposes a theoretical framework with a set of concepts to analyse rigorously how these critical functions require coordination within the technological dimension as well as within the institutional dimension. It also shows how fundamental the alignment between these two dimensions is. It argues that this alignment operates along different layers characterized successively by the structure, governance and transactions that connect technologies and institutions. These issues of coordination and alignment, at the core of the book, are substantiated through in-depth case studies of networks from the energy, water and wastewater, and transportation sectors.

New Institutional Economics (NIE) has skyrocketed in scope and influence over the last three decades. This first Handbook of NIE provides a unique and timely overview of recent developments and broad orientations. Contributions analyse the domain and perspectives of NIE; sections on legal institutions, political institutions, transaction cost economics, governance, contracting, institutional change, and more capture NIE's interdisciplinary nature. This Handbook will be of interest to economists, political scientists, legal scholars, management specialists, sociologists, and others wishing to learn more about this important subject and gain insight into progress made by institutionalists from other disciplines. This compendium of analyses by some of the foremost NIE specialists, including Ronald Coase, Douglass North, Elinor Ostrom, and Oliver Williamson, gives students and new researchers an introduction to the topic and offers established scholars a reference book for their research.

Institutional reforms and their contribution to development and growth have been a source of renewed interest as well as of many challenges over the last two decades. Identifying the forces that push towards reform and the conditions that determine the success or failure of reforms, building organizational arrangements needed to make modifications to the rules of the game sustainable, and understanding the limits to the transfer of reforms and to the help that international organizations and foreign institutions can provide to support change, raise intellectually difficult and politically highly sensitive issues. This book attempts to address these issues from an economic perspective. Combining knowledge and field experience, it develops an analysis of institutional changes and organizational transformations based on the experience of the public procurement reforms carried out in sub-Saharan Africa. This highlights the economic significance of procurement and the formidable obstacles that institutional changes face. Using an original dataset, it explores the gap between the expectations and what has been achieved. It develops a framework that intends to capture the complex interaction between the different components of reform and aims to provide useful insights for researchers and policy makers.