Policy implementation by private actors constitutes a “missing link” for understanding the implications of private governance. This paper proposes and assesses an institutional logics framework that combines a top-down, policy design approach with a bottom-up, implementation perspective on discretion. We argue that the conflicting institutional logics of the state and the market, in combination with differing degrees of goal ambiguity, accountability and hybridity play a crucial role for output performance. These arguments are analyzed based on a secondary analysis of seven case studies of private and hybrid policy implementation in diverging contexts. We find that aligning private output performance with public interests is at least partly a question of policy design congruence: private implementing actors tend to perform deficiently when the conflicting logics of the state and the market combine with weak accountability mechanisms.

As in other industrialized countries, many urban water social-ecological systems in the United States are characterized by frequent discharges of contaminated runoff, catastrophic flooding, and near-complete severance of the hydrologic cycle. Recent advancements in stormwater best management practices aim to push urban water social-ecological systems into a more sustainable regime that reconnects the hydrologic cycle and utilizes ecosystem services, such as infiltration and evapotranspiration, to improve the quality of urban and suburban water bodies. Collectively, these approaches are termed green infrastructure. As a decentralized approach, green infrastructure requires implementation on, as well as access to, property throughout a watershed, which poses particular governance challenges for watersheds where most land is held privately. We argue that green infrastructure on private property has a strong potential for creating a more sustainable regime through Citizen Stormwater Management, a participatory form of governance with strong citizen influence and engagement. We develop a classification scheme to assess policy instruments’ degree of government intervention, citizen participation, and engagement. The paper explores how various policy instruments encourage Citizen Stormwater Management across the United States on both public and private property. We then conduct a textual analysis of ten years of publicly available data from Onondaga County, New York (USA) to assess the implementation of applicable policy instruments. Findings indicate that incentive-based (carrots) along with outreach (sermon) policies can play an important role when regulatory instruments (sticks) are lacking.

Negotiated agreements are a promising pathway for policy change. This paper revisits and extends characteristics of negotiated agreements using the Advocacy Coalition Framework. We focus on two characteristics of negotiated agreements that previous literature has not explicitly addressed. First, we scrutinize the role of policy core and secondary policy beliefs in actor constellations. Secondly, we address partial success, that is, the notion that actors concede on some points, but in return succeed in others. We investigate these two characteristics in the 2014 reform of Swiss agricultural policy. Based on cluster and social network analysis, we exemplify how negotiated agreements embedded in a participatory policy process lead to a surprising level of policy change by promoting agricultural production practices with an intended positive effect on the environment. We show that rather than coalitions based on policy core beliefs, the formation of groups of actors based on secondary beliefs who span across the coalitions formed the basis for a negotiated agreement. Green and conservative groups were both able to achieve partial success. We conclude that insights from this exemplary case study should revive the concept and initialize a research agenda on negotiated agreements as a pathway for change in domestic policymaking.

This article addresses how and to what extent a governance mode can legitimately provide public services. A single case study of the partially privatized Berlin Waterworks is used to analyse the level of input and output legitimacy as well as potential trade-offs between the criteria emerging in a public–private partnership (PPP) in the water supply and sanitation sectors. While the Berlin Waterworks as a PPP leads to a lower level of resource protection and public acceptance, it leads to a higher level of efficiency and profitability than under the previous public model.