The Coherence Framework: Explaining Institutional Drift through Translation

This paper advances a philosophical account of institutional agency grounded in the structure of translation. It argues that institutions do not act directly on intention, purpose, or meaning as such, but on representations produced as these are rendered decision-relevant within structured systems of evaluation and allocation. From this perspective, institutional action is mediated by forms—criteria, metrics, models, and signals—that both enable and constrain what can be seen, compared, and selected. These forms are not neutral carriers of meaning. They are transformations of it. In becoming actionable, intention is selectively encoded, simplified, and redefined. What remains is not the original intent, but a representation that substitutes for it within the decision system. Institutional reality is therefore not merely interpreted but constructed through processes of translation. What counts as value, performance, or relevance is determined not only by normative commitments or actor beliefs, but by the representational forms through which decisions are made. These forms delimit the space of the possible: what cannot be represented cannot be selected. Within this framework, institutional drift is neither an anomaly nor a failure of rationality or alignment. It is a structural consequence of translation. As representations stabilize and become authoritative, they progressively redefine the meaning of the intentions they were meant to realize. Institutions may thus remain coherent in their operations while becoming increasingly detached from their originating purpose. The philosophical implication is a shift in the locus of agency. Agency is not located solely in actors, intentions, or decisions, but in the translation architectures that determine how meaning becomes actionable. To understand institutional behaviour is therefore to analyse how intention is transformed into representation—and how, through that transformation, the conditions of action are themselves constituted.