The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development has been engaged since the late 1980s in research on economic development and governance among Indigenous nations, particularly in the United States and Canada. That research has produced a number of key findings regarding the factors that shape Indigenous economic development outcomes. Three factors in particular have emerged repeatedly in that research: Successful Indigenous nations tend to have (1) substantive—and substantial—decision-making power backed up by (2) capable governing institutions that (3) match Indigenous political cultures. The last of these—cultural match—is the topic of this paper.

Cultural match refers to the degree of fit between the formal institutions of governance on one hand and, on the other, the informal understandings about how authority should be organized and exercised that are embedded in political culture. The paper discusses why cultural match matters in governance and development. It goes on to explore two critical dimensions of cultural match. The first is the social location of governing power: who is the “self” in self-government, and at what level of social organization should decision-making and governmental functions be organized? The second is the institutional form of governing power: what kinds of institutions will not only win allegiance from their people but prove capable of getting the job of government done? Both raise issues of cultural match. We illustrate these issues with reference to examples drawn from Indigenous nations in the United States and Canada.