ABSTRACT
Understanding institutions is central to understanding federalism. Institutional design can cause the success or failure of federalism. This chapter outlines a methodology and conceptual framework to understand the origins and evolution of federalism in Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. It applies historical institutionalism and explains how its key concepts of path dependency and critical junctures are applied to the cases. It then applies that framework to the federalisation process, developing conceptual models for the interaction of self-reinforcing and reactive paths along the road to federalism and for the linking of antecedent conditions to federal outcomes for ethnic accommodation and the management of diversity. This chapter also introduces the cases of Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, each of which has been dominated by a single ethnic group leading to internal conflict, de-democratisation and authoritarianism. Each has also had one or more federal systems in place, prior to the contemporary constitutional settlement.
