Policy design under institutional constraint: discretion, targeting, and governance infrastructure

Policy design scholarship rests upon institutional conditions that do not universally obtain: fiscal sovereignty, pluralist accountability, and distributed design authority. How design logic operates when these conditions are absent remains insufficiently specified. This paper examines policy design under institutional constraint, concentrating upon cash transfer programs in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon. Through structured comparative analysis across cases that vary in regime type and administrative capacity, the paper reconstructs design configurations along four dimensions: instrument choice, targeting architecture, legal form, and accountability arrangements. Despite considerable political heterogeneity, governments converge upon a common design logic. Cash instruments displace alternatives not for problem-solving fit but for fiscal adjustability and reversibility. Targeting operates as governance infrastructure permitting fiscal rationing, administrative centralization, and political insulation rather than as an allocation mechanism. Administrative legal forms avoid statutory entitlement and judicial review. Accountability orients toward external financiers rather than domestic populations. This convergence reflects institutional constraint (external fiscal dependence, concentrated executive discretion, continuous international engagement, and persistent crisis orientation) rather than capacity deficit or implementation failure. Within the convergent pattern, divergences in legal vehicle, targeting framing, and accountability intensity track variation in constraint intensity and in regime-specific modes of executive discretion. The paper advances three claims: design coherence requires analytical separation from normative desirability; discretion constitutes a design variable configured at the design stage; and targeting performs governance functions that account for its persistence despite allocation failures.