Interacting institutional logics in policy implementation

Abstract

Abstract When more actors—politicians, bureaucrats, or citizens—get involved in the process of policy implementation, they bring different understanding of their roles and objectives as participants in the policy. These understandings are the means–ends relationships shaping actors' behavior during the implementation process, analyzed in the literature as institutional logics. How do these institutional logics interact during the process of implementation? We argue that institutional logics do not only seamlessly coexist, but they interact in diverse ways: they may coincide, complement, clash or be unrelated. To make these interactions empirically observable, we put forward a working definition for each of them. Using an in‐depth case study of a participatory budget in Cananea, a municipality in northern Mexico, we show how the way these logics interact affects implementation: by performing their own role, actors advance their own purpose and contribute to the implementation process, even when they understand it differently. We find that the interaction among those logics do not impede effective implementation, as long as they do not clash.