Institutional Implications of Interactive Governance: Insights from Dutch Practice

Nowadays all kinds of processes of citizen involvement can be observed in practice. We label them as interactive governance in this article. Interactive governance brings with it new proto-institutions that can conflict with existing institutions of decision making. We analyze these institutional tensions in several Dutch local governments through comparative research. Our main conclusion is that there is a "missing institutional link" between the interactive process and the formal municipal decision-making process. Interactive governance needs better institutional embeddedness in order to prevent the interactive process from becoming meaningless and useless in formal decision making.