ABSTRACT
Though the issues are hardly new, my recent work on evaluation of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) programme for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has raised a number of questions about the utility of the types of theories and methods which we use in geography. I think that it is safe to say that, while we have methods for explaining some classes of behaviour, we as yet have little to help us in the analysis of the effects of rules and institutions. There are, of course, ways of analysing some types of rules in purely formal systems (e.g. Hotelling's linear markets), but, in the main, rules and institutions are simply treated as exogenous contextual variables.
