ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how neo-institutional learning affects international policy-making agency. It argues that without a set of reductionist liberal-universal categories of analysis international interveners are hard-pressed to undertake purposive policy action vis-a-vis transitional societies. The chapter describes the policy trajectory of the Merida Initiative from technical assistance and material resource transfers to institution building – the so-called Beyond Merida strategy. It discusses how governmentality studies understand neo-institutional capacity-building. The chapter argues that, by inflating the notion of context and defining it as unintelligible to liberal-universal episteme, neo-institutionalism impairs international policy-making agency. In the Merida Initiative, statebuilders' sense of agency dwindled because their liberal-universal assumptions were in decay. The more they were learning within a neo-institutional framework, the less of a foundation they had to formulate purposive, socially transformative policy. In sum, capacity-building programs like the Culture of Lawfulness rely on and escalate a neo-institutional notion of context.
