Stakeholders’ inclusion: more than a cup of tea? Measuring the performance of interactive decision making

Interactive decision making has become a recurrent practice, especially in local governments (Edelenbos, 1999; Klijn, 2008). Many administrations, in fact, involve citizens, social organizations and broadly speaking stakeholders, in the early stages of policy making, before the development of policy proposals (Kickert et al., 1997; McLaverty, 2002). The intended purpose is to adopt better and more democratic policy decisions, avoiding recurrent problems encountered in usual “go alone” decision-making (Edelenbos and Klijn, 2005); at the same time, interactive decision-making may enhance public administrations’ intangible assets (Coglianese, 2002; Irving & Stansbury, 2004) and establish bridging relationships with their publics (Van den Bosch & Van Riel, 1998). Generally speaking, stakeholders might provide decision makers with information they lack, leading to more informed solutions; conflicts and use of veto powers might be prevented through information and consultation (Bobbio, 2005); citizen and social organizations might support the implementation of policies that are regarded as more democratic and legitimate. Interaction can take place through many organisational arrangements: public hearings, referenda, participatory planning procedures, citizens’ juries, etc. (OECD, 2001; Bobbio, 2005). On the other side, interactive policy making is not riskless. Decisions on who or what group constitutes a stakeholder to be consulted arises problems of democratic accountability (Barnes et al., 2003); vested interests could affect decisions; decision making process might become too time consuming (Irving & Stansbury, 2004). Although interactive policy-making has been largely debated, how to evaluate its effects is still under-analyzed (Koppenjian, 2008). The present article tries to conceptually and empirically contribute to this debate. More specifically, the main research questions the paper addresses is: how do organizational arrangements influence the outcomes of p. 3 interactive policy making? The article proposes, consequently, that the organizational structures adopted in practice to manage an interactive process influences significantly its results, although mediated by some contextual factors. In other terms, we base our analysis on two assumptions: the importance of network management (Kickert et al., 1997; Klijn, 2008) and the influence of formal organizational structure in shaping behaviours (Egeberg, 2003). In the light of this assumption, a model for qualitative analysis has been developed, mainly enriching some previous contributions in the public administration literature. Subsequently, the model has been used to analyse five case studies, with minor adaptations suggested by the data collected during the research. The paper presents the conceptual model and the results of five case studies.