UCL SSEES is the lead partner and coordinator of a consortium of eight other universities across the region, that will be looking at the key formal and informal ‘rules of the game’ and identifying the ‘unwritten rules’ underpinning the tactical manoeuvring between formal and informal institutions, at various levels of social life.

The EC commented that the project was welcome because it paid attention to the lived experience of people across the region, including a “highly relevant” empirical study via interviews with around 6,200 people in the countries of the Western Balkans.

INFORM is a project that brings together teams from nine European countries to conduct multidisciplinary social science research on formal and informal institutions in the Balkan region. The project, launched in March 2016, will be carried out over the course of three years in the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme.

Objective

"Southeast Europe has seen a century of continuous transformation and “transition” – the disappearance and emergence of states, political and legal systems, ideologies, institutions, and social classes. This has been accompanied by a stability of social practices resistant to change. Shaken by radically changing ideological and legal structures, citizens rely on customary and informal social networks of kin, symbolic kin, and friends for meeting economic needs, and on clan- or kin-related structures rather than the rule of law for security and protection. We trace the persistence of informal practices to: 1) the external origin of major transformations, including the “transitions” to and from socialism; 2) the incomplete character of change, which has tended to be replaced by equally radical but diametrically opposed projects; 3) the development of a buffer culture based on informal practices, directed to enabling people to survive under unstable conditions; and 4) the widening gap between formal institutions and informal social practices.
The distance between proclaimed goals and existing practices represents the key challenge to the European integration of Balkan societies. The integration process could end with superficial change, behind which the ""real"" social life of corruption, clientelism, tension, inequality, and exclusion will continue to unfold. We propose to explicate the key formal and informal “rules of the game”, and to identify and decipher the ""unwritten rules"" which underpin tactical maneuvering between formal and informal institutions, in various spheres and at various levels of social life. These would then be compared to the demands and recommendations laid out in the key EU documents outlining expectations from Southeast European states. The goal is to contribute to the formulation of policy recommendations which would aim not to eradicate informal practices, but to close the gap between formal and informal institutions in Balkan societies."