Explaining governance with depth: Critical realism and the morphogenetic turn in public administration research

Review

This paper argues that public administration research needs greater causal depth than either regularity-based positivism or meaning-centered interpretivism usually provides. Its proposed answer is a combined Critical Realist and Morphogenetic Approach (CR-MA): governance outcomes should be explained through the interaction of pre-existing structural relations, cultural propositions, and reflexive agency unfolding over time. The contribution is explicitly programmatic rather than foundational. The paper does not claim to introduce critical realism to public administration, but to consolidate and operationalize it across reform, accountability, discretion, informal governance, and public value.

The governance value of this approach lies in refusing to equate formal institutional design with operative authority. Rules, mandates, accountability systems, and organizational charts are treated as only part of the causal architecture. Deeper relations of dependency, domination, obligation, resource control, professional culture, political authority, and informal bargaining may determine whether formal arrangements become effective, symbolic, resisted, or selectively enacted. This is especially useful for governance analysis because it asks not merely whether a control exists, but what mechanisms make that control consequential in practice.

Archer's morphogenetic sequence gives the framework its strongest analytical discipline. Structural and cultural conditions at T1 condition interaction at T2-T3; actors then reproduce those arrangements through morphostasis or transform them through morphogenesis at T4. This temporal separation avoids collapsing structure and agency into a single process and makes institutional persistence itself an object of explanation. The worked reinterpretation of Indonesian budgeting reform demonstrates the method by showing how formal legislative authority coexisted with traditional authority, loyalty, strategic bargaining, and informal "half-room" meetings that narrowed deliberation while still producing legally compliant budgets.

The paper's strongest contribution is therefore methodological: it equips qualitative and mixed-method research to move from observed events toward plausible generative mechanisms while keeping power, meaning, and institutional context in view. It is particularly persuasive where governance outcomes diverge despite similar formal reforms, because it directs attention to the authority relations and cultural conditions that mediate implementation rather than treating variation as noise.

The main risk is explanatory overreach. Retroductive inference can become post hoc if researchers infer mechanisms that fit observed outcomes without sufficiently discriminating among alternatives. The paper acknowledges this by requiring empirical warrant and consideration of competing explanations, but it does not provide a strong operational standard for deciding when one inferred mechanism is materially better supported than another. The worked case remains a reinterpretation of prior research rather than a study designed prospectively around CR-MA, so it demonstrates plausibility more than comparative explanatory superiority.

A second limitation concerns normativity. CR-MA can reveal how authority, exclusion, dependency, and informal power reproduce themselves, but explanation does not by itself establish whether those arrangements are legitimate or what remedy should follow. The paper correctly treats critical realism as explanatory infrastructure rather than a self-sufficient theory of governance. That boundary should be preserved. A mechanism explaining why an accountability regime stabilizes can be analytically valid even when the regime itself is unjust.

The framework should therefore be judged as a diagnostic architecture rather than a governance prescription. Its next empirical test should compare CR-MA prospectively against competing explanations in cases where reform outcomes diverge, with explicit rival mechanisms, observable implications, temporal evidence, and disconfirming conditions. If it can systematically eliminate weaker explanations rather than merely enrich description, it would materially strengthen causal analysis in public administration.

The paper's institutional implication is important: governance systems should be evaluated as historically conditioned relations of authority and practice, not as collections of formally specified rules. Accountability, state capacity, and legitimacy are produced through how those relations are enacted and reproduced over time.

Key Insight

Formal rules do not govern by themselves: administrative outcomes are produced through the interaction of structural relations, cultural expectations, and reflexive agency over time, so governance analysis must identify the mechanisms that reproduce or transform those arrangements rather than infer effectiveness from institutional design alone.