About POLCA

POLCA is a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie Staff Exchanges programme that tackles a fundamental challenge in global governance: why decades of rule‑of‑law and democratization efforts have so often struggled to deliver in non‑Western contexts. The project’s core premise is that law and governance reforms cannot be understood—or improved—without engaging the alternative institutions and norms that organize social life outside formal state structures. POLCA integrates interdisciplinary research with hands‑on exchanges across sectors and regions to generate empirically grounded insights and practical guidance for policy, development, and business actors.

At its heart, POLCA advances three interconnected goals. First, it will collect original empirical data and produce new theoretical perspectives on how non‑Western institutions and norms shape legal and governance trajectories. Second, it will engage with and contribute to the scholarly debates in law, development and governance (LDG) and political economy—decentering Western‑centric approaches and enriching them with perspectives from Central Asia. Third, it will translate findings into strategic intelligence and policy insights for international organizations, development agencies, and decision‑makers within and beyond the European Union. 

The consortium brings together an exceptional network: 10 universities in Europe and North America, 10 universities in Central and East Asia (including institutions in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), and 10 non‑academic partners spanning civil society, think tanks, public administration academies, anti‑corruption councils, and law enforcement training bodies. This architecture ensures access to field sites, diverse mentoring, and multi‑sector perspectives that are rarely available to research teams operating in authoritarian or hybrid regimes.

POLCA’s geographical focus is Central Asia. After the Soviet collapse, the region became a laboratory for Western‑backed rule‑of‑law and governance initiatives. Yet, as scholarship and practice attest, formal institutional transplants often encountered resilient informal orders—customary norms, religious values, and communitarian practices—that profoundly shape everyday legality, dispute resolution, and socio‑economic life. By studying these dynamics empirically and conceptually, POLCA aims to design more context‑sensitive pathways for building trust in formal institutions from the ground up.

The project’s novelty lies in its alternative orders framework: a multi‑level lens that examines how global and regional norms intersect with national legal design and local social orders. Instead of viewing informal practices as mere anomalies, POLCA treats them as social facts that can complement or compete with state law. This shift unlocks a richer understanding of why conventional reform tools underperform and where new leverage points for change may exist.

Equally important is POLCA’s training and exchange mission. The programme equips researchers with language skills, fieldwork preparation suited to authoritarian settings, and interdisciplinary methods—from ethnography and doctrinal analysis to mixed quantitative approaches. Exchanges between academic and non‑academic partners are structured to build durable collaborations and to cultivate transferable skills that enhance employability across sectors.

By combining deep field access, theoretical innovation, and sustained multi‑sector engagement, POLCA seeks to reshape how scholars and practitioners read non‑Western governance realities and act within them—delivering practical instruments for improved rule‑of‑law and governance strategies in Central Asia and beyond.