PhD Supervisor: David Sylvan
Funding Organisation: Swiss National Science Foundation, Doc.CH scheme
Timeline: September 2020–August 2023
Budget: CHF 217,393
Keywords: Policy Diffusion; Organisations; Urban Policy; Public Policy; Cities; Diffusion/Cascade
Why do cities which appear different implement particular diffused policies in similar ways? And, conversely, why do cities which appear similar implement other diffused policies in different ways? Certain policy innovations like “quality of life policing” seem to move from city to city in toto – the policy is implemented without any significant change to its core subcomponents – while enterprise zones, e-government and waste management policies are subject to significant policy redesign as they are implemented in new urban settings.
I address this pair of questions, that I refer to as the diffusion asymmetry puzzle, by introducing concepts from public policy and organisational theory to diffusion studies, arguing that what explains the different implementation trajectories is due to the confluence of the degree of policy package-ness and bureaucratic inclusiveness. Overall, my argument is that policies designed as tightly connected wholes, that I refer to as policy packages, are more likely to be adopted in toto by recipient units than policy modules, made up of loosely bounded subcomponents. Moreover, I argue that adopting units’ characteristics, namely pre-existing organisational routines and the way they are incorporated in the implementation process, facilitates or hinders certain trajectories of policy implementation.
This project relies on a mixed-methods approach to investigate disparities in implementation trajectories for various urban innovations in American and European cities. Drawing on archival research, and semi-structured interviews, I first build a network model of interdependence among policy subcomponents to measure the degree to which the innovation is more a policy package or a policy module, then construct an empirically validated computational model showing the way in which – for a given degree of package-ness – iterated interactions between organisational leaders and lower-level bureaucrats give rise to specific implementation trajectories. I analyse two policy innovations and a dozen of adopting units for each innovation, which will yield three research papers.
The doctoral dissertation contributes to the literature on policy diffusion, by analysing a phenomenon not yet explored, and to the literature on urban policy, by showing the various contingencies of organisational change in local bureaucracies. Finally, far from discarding previous findings in international relations on the diffusion of social and economic policies, this project aims to show how existing theories apply differently for different innovations and for different organisational contexts.