Any book by Johan Olsen deserves attention, because he has played a substantial role in bringing an institutional understanding back into focus for political science. This book continues to develop that institutional focus and asks above all: Is it possible to design better institutional arrangements for governance? It offers as case studies the experience of developing European Union institutions and as a subtheme the impact of new public management (NPM) on the organization of government services in the last few decades. The conclusion is that institutional theory—or at least his particular brand of it—does indeed offer powerful insights that confirm that while intentional design is not bound to fail, it is unlikely ever to fully succeed.

According to Olsen, the main reason why change can never be entirely delivered as planned is because no reformer ever starts with a blank sheet and each reform is driven by a range of interests and voices. Institutions are malleable to a degree, but they have a life of their own and condition and limit what emerges in the process of reform. The familiar themes of Olsen's early work on institutions are redeployed in this book. Institutions are understood not as concrete or set entities; they are conceived as “a set of prescribed behavioural rules and practices embedded in structures of meaning and resources” (p. 108). They are constantly being made and remade, and a shift in one source of rules—for example, by changing incentives—does not guarantee a corresponding change in behavior by institutional actors, as they may continue to act according to different meanings as to what is, or is not, appropriate behavior. Designing an institution is a bit like poking at jelly. You can make it wobble, you can shift its shape, but you cannot always predict the consequences of your intervention, and you cannot rule out the possibility that your intervention will make things worse than they were before.

Governing through Institution Building is described by the author as “never planned” (p. x), in the sense that rather like one of the institutional creations that he regards as so central to politics, there was a start but the next steps were not prescribed and the outcome was unknown. The start for Olsen was the insight that to understand intentional reform processes, it would be a good idea to look empirically at a major institutional reform, such as the creation of the EU. After an introductory overview chapter, there is a long chapter detailing the grand experiment of European integration that provides the heart of the original contribution of the book. The next chapters take a different tack and draw on previously published articles to discuss key controversies in political organization: how to explain change and continuity, the balance between central authority and autonomy, and the uncertain role and function of bureaucracy in a democracy. The final chapter heads off in a slightly different direction. Here, Olsen considers whether political science needs to develop its own distinctive take on political organizations or simply borrow from other disciplines, concluding that political science ought to develop its own understandings of this important theme. Overall, the book confirms its description of being unplanned in that although there is value in all the parts, the reader does not get the impression of an integrated thesis but of a series of fragmented arguments, a frustrating experience.

So what of the insights into institutional reform provided by the case study of the EU? The key messages are about the limitations of intentional change and the sense that the EU worked because it found a way of accommodating not one design but multiple designs and ambitions: “[A] basic feature of the dynamics of change in the EU has been the willingness to wait for consensus to emerge and the ability to strike a variety of not entirely consistent compromises among actors with a different vision of Europe's future” (p. 64). Arguably, though, the focus of the case study is hardly a perfect choice given the theoretical challenges presented by the author, and, moreover, the empirical work is quite general and as drawn it appears entirely from secondary sources. If the focus is on intentional change driven with a clear democratic vision, then the EU seems a strange choice of case study because it has been driven by competing and often incoherent agendas and has simultaneously been required to confront the embedded practices of established national states with multiple traditions. It would constitute a most difficult case for demonstrating the possibility of design, but Olsen does not reflect on this point much or the reasons for the choice of case study generally. The reader is therefore left unclear as to whether to conclude that this is a fair test of intentional change. Moreover, the lack of depth of the empirical work makes one wonder whether it furnishes the kind of empirical grounding of Olsen's brand of institutional analysis that he claims.

The analysis of new public management's application suffers from many of the same weaknesses. Here, a separate chapter is not provided but, instead, empirical work is incorporated into the chapters that look at controversies in political organization. They offer undoubtedly sophisticated reflections on dilemmas of political organization, but they fail to demonstrate the virtues of the institutional approach because they lack a focused empirical investigation on how NPM has somehow failed to deliver. The reader is left with the clear impression that Olsen often finds NPM's prescriptions crass—a judgement that I would not disagree with—but one is not clear why.

The book seems written to counter both naive institutional designers and their academic counterparts, who advocate a democratic instrumentalism based on rationalist premises, and fatalists, who believe that all designed reforms will fail. I say “seems” because the book fails to give sufficient space to descriptions and analyses of these alternative perspectives. The core message of the book is that intentional change is possible but will always be messy and complicated: “[A]n institutional perspective conceives of political actors neither as engineers with full control nor fatalists with no range of choice” (p. 123). This point may offer a valuable corrective to the ambitions of simple-minded reformers. But it is limited in its power to counter more serious critiques of institutional reform.

For fatalists looking at the project of European integration, the failings of governance structures around the euro might confirm their sense that the designers of the grand project missed something vital in developing the single currency. For while muddling through got them so far, it caused the reformers to overlook a crucial and lethal challenge by not understanding the governance structure needed to back the euro. For the architects of the EU, on the other hand, the challenge remains how to design an economic and monetary system that is dynamic and politically convincing. Reading this book would simply tell them what they already know: It is not going to be easy.