Decision-Making Authority
Examine who determines the agenda, negotiates terms, designs institutions, governs execution, and exercises oversight.
The Institution
Women as architects.
Authority by design.
The Rimer Institution studies how legitimate institutions perceive, adapt to, and govern structural change.
Our founding argument
The Institution argues that women’s decision-making authority is a structural condition of legitimate governance. The Institution examines the distribution of authority through five dimensions, from determining the agenda to holding institutions accountable.
The argument concerns institutional design. It does not depend on a claim that women govern inherently better than men or share a uniform political position.
Explore the five dimensions ↗What we study
Our three pillars
These three connected areas define the Institution’s work: who holds authority, how that relates to legitimacy, and how governing rules are designed.
Governance Legitimacy
Study the relationship between authority and the legitimacy of governing institutions.
Institutional Architecture
Use evidence to inform the design of institutional rules, roles, and procedures.
How we approach the work
From the pillars to the argument
The pillars identify what we study. The ideas below explain how we examine authority in practice, the relationship we investigate, and the long-term objective guiding the Institution.
The institutional mechanism
Structural authority as infrastructure
Decision-making authority is established through rules, mandates, and procedures. These determine who can negotiate terms, direct resources, and require an account of decisions.
For people affected by those decisions, the distinction is concrete: the terms set by an institution can determine access to services, the use of resources, and the means to challenge a decision.
The research argument
Legitimacy by design
The Institution studies how the distribution of decision-making authority relates to governance legitimacy. It uses evidence to examine institutional arrangements and inform their design.
The founding argument remains open to testing. Its evidence does not establish that any one arrangement guarantees trust, cooperation, or durable outcomes.
The long-term objective
Equal architectural authority
The Institution’s long-term goal is for women to hold 50% of meaningful architectural authority in the institutions of the international order, considered across the five dimensions.
The objective concerns authority to set agendas, negotiate, design, implement, and oversee. Counting positions alone does not establish that authority. The methods needed to measure progress toward the objective are still being developed.
Independent.
Evidence-seeking.
The Institution maintains independence in its research, conclusions, and public positioning. Its work is open to critique, testing, and revision as evidence develops.
Public communication makes the argument accessible while preserving its meaning and evidence limits. People and institutions can examine the evidence and decide whether the work is useful to them. Cooperation is pursued through clear arrangements for negotiating, implementing, and overseeing shared decisions.
Institutional Legitimacy Growth Model
From everyday questions
to institutional decisions
Understand the decisions around you—and how their rules can be examined and shaped. Explore how observation gives rise to research, public understanding, future leadership, and institutional application.
The Rimer Institution begins by identifying questions about how authority operates. These observations guide research; they are not treated as findings until the evidence has been examined. The model below illustrates how that inquiry can develop into public knowledge and, over time, practical institutional use.
Start with a decision that touches your life.
A service changes. A workplace introduces AI. A school changes its rules. Begin by asking what changed, who is affected, and who had authority to decide.
Your starting question
Who decided this—and what could they actually decide?
Those questions give research something concrete to examine.
Look behind the decision.
Research examines the rules, mandates, negotiations, and records behind what happened. The five dimensions help distinguish being present from having authority to shape a decision.
What to look for
Who could set the agenda, negotiate terms, write rules, direct execution, and require accountability?
Read the published work →Published findings become useful to more people when their meaning is clear.
Make the findings useful in everyday life.
This is where you come in. Explore a decision, examine the evidence, and connect it to your work or community. Public explanations should make clear what people can decide, what they cannot, and why that matters.
Try it yourself
Choose an area in the five-dimension explorer and ask where authority sits. The fictional examples explain the framework; they do not establish real-world outcomes.
Explore a decision →Understanding how authority works provides a foundation for learning how to exercise it.
Learn how to shape the rules.
The Institution’s longer-term educational work aims to prepare future women architects to set priorities, negotiate terms, design rules, govern execution, and exercise oversight. That work builds on research and public understanding.
A question to carry forward
Which decision would you want authority to shape—and what mandate would you need?
That preparation can inform proposals for how institutions distribute authority.
Bring informed proposals into institutional decisions.
Research and learning can inform proposals about who has authority and how it is exercised. Institutions must examine, decide on, and implement any changes through their own governing processes.
Keep examining what happens
Did the rules change? Who now holds authority? What do the records show? Institutional use and its effects must be documented, not assumed.
What happens in practice creates new observations—and the inquiry continues.