ABSTRACT
To examine the consequences of the ideational turn for an understanding of institutions, it is common to put institutions and uncertainty in diametrical opposition: the function of institutions or regimes is commonly conceived of as the reduction of uncertainty and associated inefficiencies. Even if there is an acknowledgement of the existence of ‘genuine’, ‘radical’ or ‘strong’ uncertainty for understanding institutions, many contributions to the literature on ideas focus predominantly either on how uncertainty can be ‘resolved’ or ‘reduced’ in order to allow for ‘rational’ action, or on how ‘strong uncertainty’ might be restricted to exceptional cases such as ‘crises’. Although it is certainly the case that ‘genuine uncertainty’ is crucial for understanding crises, less effort has so far been spent on understanding how and why uncertainty is maintained and reproduced. For example, by asking how new contingencies or ‘newness’ can emerge or how structural change is possible, one implicitly points to processes by which structures become decoupled and generate new uncertainty. The same point can be expressed in more temporal terms: if uncertainty is already reduced to manageable risks, and if we want to focus on social change or actions over time, then the question becomes relevant as to where this uncertainty comes from and how the (un)structuring of the future occurs. I expect that hardly anyone would suggest that regimes and institutions reduce uncertainty once and for all. Hence, by referring to change – and the role of institutions in structuring this change – one needs a framework that presupposes some relationship between the present and the future, how present decisions are relevant for the outlook of possible futures, and how ‘genuine’ uncertainty decouples, reconfigures and allows for a specific relationship between present and possible future events.
