This paper is concerned with the question how we should understand cases on property rights in general, and on land economics in particular, in which a remarkable level of growth (or other measures of institutional performance) is combined with so-called ‘perverse’ institutions. That is to say institutions that are not proposed by the neoliberal politics, in which the insights of mainstream economics (orthodoxy) and especially the economics of property rights and related market policies based on formal competition and corporate laws, figure prominently. This approach works out of the idea that societal objectives can be realized by following the blueprint of establishing the ‘right’ institutions, so the behavior of the actors in society is incentivized in the right direction and the societal objectives such as efficiency, innovation, and economic growth are realized. In this approach economic policy is about creating the right institutional form of the economy according to the “blueprint” of neo-liberal politics, which is based on mainstream economics, also known as neoclassical economics (NCE), or orthodoxy. This paper will review various theoretical positions that might substantiate or provide credence to an alternative view based on the function of institutions.@en

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.@en