Institutional Perspectives
Week 1 – institutionalism
Summary compulsory readings
Stoker: governance as theory: five propositions
Government = formal institution of the state, make decisions and has the capacity to enforce them
(coercive power).
Governance = creating the conditions for ordered rule and collective action.
Five propositions:
1. Governance refers to a set of institutions and actors that are drawn from but also beyond
government.
2. Governance identifies the blurring of boundaries and responsibilities for tackling social
and economic issues.
3. Governance identifies the power dependence involved in the relationships between institutions
involved in collective action.
4. Governance is about autonomous self-governing networks of actors.
5. Governance recognizes the capacity to get things done which does not rest on the power of
government to command or use its authority. It sees government as able to use new tools and
techniques to steer and guide.
Each proposition has associated with it a certain dilemma or critical issue:
– There is a divorce between the complex reality of decision-making associated with
governance and the normative codes used to explain and justify government.
– The blurring of responsibilities can lead to blame avoidance or scapegoating.
– Power dependence exacerbates the problem of unintended consequences for government.
– The emergence of self-governing networks raises difficulties over accountability.
– Even where governments operate in a flexible way to steer collective action governance failure may
occur.
Rhodes: waves of governance (3 forms of governance)
Three waves of governance:
1) Network governance = the modernist-empiricist story of the changing state that described
the shift from hierarchy to markets and networks. It reduces the diversity of governance to a
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, social logic of modernization, institutional norms, or a set of classifications or correlations
across networks.
2) Metagovernance = reinvents the state capacity to informal control and steer. Also
modernist-empiricist assumptions. Argues for a top-down narrative of state regulation and
control. No necessary logical or structural process determining the form of network
governance or the role of the central state in the metagovernance of governance. hich
focuses on the mechanisms and institutions that manage self- governance, in other words
“the governance of governance”
3) Interpretive governance = the narrative about the changing state shows how governance
arises from the bottom up as conflicting beliefs, competing traditions, and varied dilemmas
cause diverse practices. Encourages telling stories about how governance is variously
constructed and reconstructed. Much in common with anthropology.
Streuer: Disentangling governance
Polycentricity, a governance system in which multiple governing bodies interact to make and enforce
rules within a specific policy arena or location, is considered to be one of the best ways to achieve
collective action in the face of disturbance change. (komt niet van Streuer)
Governance is regarded as synonymous with the broad notions of steering and regulation. It is
difficult to comprehend how public policies and non-state types of regulation relate with each other.
Governance is full complexity of rulemaking in polycentric globalized societies formulating,
promulgating, implementing and/or enforcing societally relevant rules (binding or voluntary ones) by
government, business and/or societal actors whereby the rules can apply to others and to
themselves.
CSR and new governance are complementary concepts that both fundamentally reshape the roles of
the public and the private sectors in similar directions.
Government regulation: hard and soft:
Hard mandatory governmental regulation. Rules that are binding to all (or for members of a
particular group), and that the executive and judicial branches of government (or agencies
themselves) monitor and enforce compliance. Examples: laws, decrees/directives, economic
instruments (taxes, fees, and cap-and-trade schemes).
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,Soft the rise of governance and CSR in recent decades leveraged and diversified respective
practices into an increasingly important sub-type of governmental regulation. Soft regulation is not
legally binding, they suggest certain behaviors rather than prescribing or enforcing them legally with
sanctions.
Self-regulation by businesses:
Industry self-regulation = a group of major companies or a trade association establishes agreements,
standards, codes of conduct or audit programmers that address all firms of a particular industry with
varying degrees of formalization and bindingness.
Regulation by civil society:
Civil lobbying strategy to steer business by demanding legislation from governments oftentimes fails,
so nowadays CS aim to regulate businesses by addressing them directly in confrontational ways.
Co-regulation = umbrella term for co-operative forms of steering in which actors from different
societal domains aim to achieve common objectives or supply public services jointly.
Public co-management = involves CS and government actors joint management of common pool
resources (Ostrom et al)
Public co-regulation = (businesses and government) most popular co-regulatory tools is certification
schemes and partnerships. Partnerships are self-organizing alliances in which actors from two or
three societal domains strive for common goals and synergies by sharing their domain-specific
resources as well as risks in non-hierarchical, network-like interactions.
Meta governance = the governance of the governance. Key issue for meta-governance pursued by
governments is to provide direction and control on the interplay of various types of regulation
coming from whatever societal domain on a particular issue.
PowerPoint lecture notes:
Policy impasse = a situation in which progress is impossible, especially because the people involved
cannot agree: The dispute had reached an impasse, as neither side would compromise. Example:
traffic congestion
Policy failure = policies are not properly working to solve wicked problems. Example: availability of
houses, the housing crisis.
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, Policy fallout = a lot of policies and strategies to solve the wicked problem, but, we are failing out of
the ordinary. Example: financial crisis, theory suggest that we cannot be in such a bad debt. However,
reality shows that we are in much more debt than suggested.
Policy drama = Real crisis. Example: global warming.
Who solves all these issues?
- State
- Market
- Civil Society
If we change the rules of the game within the institutions around or through the actors, we solve the
wicked problems.
Institutions are important because it explains why “things go as they go”, why people behave in a
certain way (societal patterns). To implement spatial or environmental transformations, you need to
understand these social and governance patterns. And then you can change them.
Institutions:
Example: Policy stations, schools, and hospitals. Are all core institutions of our society, they structure
on how individuals behave. Individuals are reliant on institutions in their community. The institutions
make sure to meet the needs of society.
Two ways to see institutions:
1) Conservative = sees institutions as being natural positive byproducts of human nature.
Example: the institution of hospitals forms naturally from the activities of humans and
naturally benefits them.
2) Progressive = institutions are artificial creations that need to be redesigned if they are to be
helpful to humanity. Example: see businesses as potentially harming society if they aren’t
reined in.
So, institutions are the social structures in society. All these structures are continued past the time
span of any individual and are not dependent on any individual either.
Institutions as:
- Ways of doing social and societal patterns
- Ways of thinking discourses
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