Structures, ancient institutions, and institutional logics acting on the hybridization of co-production mechanisms

Governance network theory has been developed as a theoretical approach of New Public Governance (NPG), and might replace New Public Management (NPM) strategies and practices (Osborne, 2010) to become the dominant steering... [ view full abstract ]

Governance network theory has been developed as a theoretical approach of New Public Governance (NPG), and might replace New Public Management (NPM) strategies and practices (Osborne, 2010) to become the dominant steering paradigm (Klijn & Koppenjan, 2012), despite some doubts (Christensen and Laegreid, 2007). Even though NPG practices emerge, they will be confronted by several institutional logics (Lawrence et al, 2011), different public administration practices (Klijn & Koppenjan, 2012), and hybrid institutional assemblages. This new paradigm includes the well-known co-production as specific mode of public governance, in which service providers and members of the community make substantial contributions (Bovair & Loeffler, 2016).

We offer a discussion on the hybridization among ancient institutions, current and challenging institutional logics, affecting the adoption of a participatory governance mechanism. The institutional hybridization also depends on imprinted structure devices imposed in the first regulation, or to any future formal changes in the regulation mechanism. Changes in behavior are not just dependent on informal institutions, but also on different structures (rules, norms, criteria) imposed to the group or community by an external agent. If the external agent has coercion power and the change is minimally accepted it can influence future behavior, imprinting a new institutional development path to that specific group.

We selected as a case participatory network governance structure adopted by several countries, ‘local citizens councils’ or municipal councils (hereafter councils). The trajectory of modernization matters (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2017). Some countries evolved from a Weberian administration, to a typical NPM administration institutionalizing values as efficiency, meritocracy and public-value. There are still some countries, like those in Latin America in which NPM ideas did not prevail, despite some attempts. For those countries, as Brazil, ancient societal values (authoritarism, corporativism and personalism) merged with political and economic system logics, as the massive state presence in citizen’s life and tolerance for corruption. And these might distort the logic of participatory governance mechanisms.

Our approach is mainly interpretivist. First, we departed from a theoretical sampling (Eisenhardt, 1989) to run 11 interviews with councils of 2 different service-deliveries: education and child and adolescent rights protection. Using an inductive technique, we collected elements of the dominant institutional logics (Reay & Jones, 2016) and the structural patterns (imposed council formal rules) which eventually mitigate the suppressing effect from the ancient logic on the co-production logic. Finally, we run a survey to councilors to segregate groups according to councilors perceptions on political self-efficacy and control of the agenda setting. We then compared the presence of mentioned structural patterns and offer a discussion on their effects.

We found the intended governance logic is blended with ancient institutions, and commercial and authoritative logics, and these are more prominent in councils which the structure devices are weak. In addition, we suggest based on our evidences that it is possible to mitigate the presence of ancient institutions if some mechanisms protect for enough time the emergence of the challenging new logic.