Distinguish from
Value agreement
Institutions often exist precisely because participants cannot be assumed to share values or interests.
A lens
Institutional / procedural alignment
Do rules, rights, procedures, and institutions make heterogeneous behavior mutually workable?
Some systems coordinate not because their participants share deep values or intentions, but because institutions organize how they may interact.
Try seeing it
The structure between the parts can carry alignment.
Contracts specify obligations. Property rights delimit control. Prices create common terms of exchange. Procedures determine who may decide, challenge, appeal, or revise.
These arrangements can make behavior predictable and mutually compatible even among people who disagree substantially about what should ultimately happen.
Look for
Thin interfaces
What small set of rules or signals allows heterogeneous participants to interact without understanding everything about one another?
Watch out for
What the institution leaves out
A clean formal interface can ignore external effects, unmeasured harms, unequal power, or information that does not fit its categories.
A question to carry elsewhere