Institutional Sustainability as a Dynamic Capability in the Peripheral State

Abstract

Institutional sustainability has often been treated as a normative attribute associated with organizational stability and administrative integrity. However, in peripheral state contexts marked by political instability and bureaucratic fragility, this notion requires analytical reinterpretation. This article reconceptualizes institutional sustainability as a dynamic state capability, understood as a cumulative process of bureaucratic capital retention, organizational learning, and adaptive administrative reconfiguration. Drawing on a theoretical-analytical approach grounded in a systematized review of the literature on state capacity, historical institutionalism, and dynamic capabilities, the study proposes an integrative model that shifts the focus from formal institutional design to the internal mechanisms responsible for preserving and renewing state competencies over time. It argues that people governance constitutes a central infrastructure of this adaptive dynamic. The findings suggest that, in peripheral states, institutional continuity depends less on formal normative arrangements and more on the intertemporal consolidation of organizational capacities capable of sustaining strategic coherence across political cycles.