Development of the New System of Housing Finance

Abstract

In this chapter, I consider the third issue area of Russian housing reform: the transformation of the system of housing finance and investment. The process of social learning observed in this sub-case to a large degree is similar to the one I examined in the sub-case of housing property rights in Chapter 4. Specifically, I will argue that the presence of two different paradigmatic frameworks in this sub-case has led to the tension between them and there currently exists a possibility of the process of paradigmatic revision occurring in this issue area. Being set in the same institutional environment — where exogenous influences capable of altering the course of social learning were absent — the attempted paradigmatic revision process in housing finance has taken place from the mid-2000s as an evolutionary dynamic: the addition of new policy instruments and settings to the ones institutionalised at the earlier stages of policy-making in the 1990s.