Coherence through Drift: How Institutions Govern Representations Instead of Reality

How Institutions Forget What They Are For Modern institutions have become extraordinarily capable of coordination, measurement, optimization, and control. Yet many people increasingly experience institutions as strangely disconnected from the realities they were created to serve. This paper examines how institutional drift emerges through processes of translation, abstraction, and operational representation. As intent is translated into metrics, dashboards, allocation systems, and decision rules, those representations gradually become authoritative in their own right. Over time, institutions may become highly effective at optimizing representations of alignment while losing relation to the human and operational realities those systems were meant to reflect. Drawing together the conceptual frameworks and governance architectures developed across the Coherence Programme, the paper introduces a broader theory of institutional coherence centered on interpretive maintenance: the ongoing capacity of institutions to remain reflectively connected to their purpose as systems, decisions, and interpretations evolve across time. Positioned at the intersection of institutional theory, governance studies, organizational systems, information infrastructures, and philosophy of technology, the paper argues that resilient institutions require more than efficiency or control alone. They require the ability to continuously realign purpose, interpretation, and operational action before drift becomes structurally embedded. At its core, this paper asks a simple but increasingly urgent question: can institutions still remember what they are for? The paper contributes to the broader Coherence Programme, which studies how institutions drift not because they stop functioning, but because systems gradually learn to succeed on translated definitions of success.