The Institutional Theory of Change

The first, developed over decades by large NGOs, academic institutions, and policy advocates, is built around leverage points: legislation, platform accountability, and evidence produced in forms that institutional decision-makers can act on. That theory of change has produced real wins. Major platform regulation exists in part because people in this field worked on it against well-funded resistance.

But that theory of change has a structural blind spot, and the conference repeatedly exposed it. It requires harm to be legible to institutions for them to act on it. Legibility is not the same as visibility. A harm can be completely visible to the people experiencing it and still be illegible to institutional actors because it is not quantified properly, does not map onto existing legal categories, is too geographically or culturally specific to generalize, or involves communities that were never part of the design conversation.

The large institution theory of change is, in good faith, trying to make things better while structurally producing conditions that render practitioner knowledge invisible. Not maliciously. Invisibility is a feature of institutional legibility.

The wins it has produced are real and were hard won, and the infrastructure it built, legislative, regulatory, and evidentiary, is essential to the field.

The challenge is not that this approach is wrong. The challenge is that it is incomplete. If we want to understand the full reality of online harms, we need to look beyond what institutions can easily see and begin listening more carefully to what communities experience every day.