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Complexity is inherent to the policy processes and to more and more domains such as environment or social policy. Complexity produces unexpected and counterintuitive effects, in particular, the phenomenon of policy regimes falling short of expectations while made by refined policies. This paper addresses this phenomenon by investigating the process of policy integration and its nonlinearities in the long run. We consider that the increase in the number of policies unexpectedly impacts the policy coherence within a policy regime. We argue that, depending on the degree of policy interactions, this impact varies in direction and intensity over time, which explains nonlinearities in integration. The impact turns negative when the regime is made of numerous policies, which favors non-coordinated policy interactions. Finally, the negative impact prevents further integration as stated by the Institutional Complexity Trap hypothesis and explains the contemporary paradoxical phenomenon of ineffective policy regimes made of refined policies. Empirically, we draw on a relational analysis of policies in the Swiss flood risk policy regime from 1848 to 2017. We study the co-evolution of the number of policies and of their de facto interlinkages, i.e., the co-regulations of a common issue. Findings support that the Institutional Complexity Trap is a structural and long-term dynamic punctuated by periods of policy learning and policy selection. We identify three main phases in the evolution of the regime: the start (1848–1874), the development (1874–1991), and the Institutional Complexity Trap (since 1991).

The Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework has contributed to understanding collective action problems in fragmented governance and identified mechanisms for overcoming them. Participation in collaboration is risky––even if it has the potential to make all parties better off. This framework has uniquely shown how collaboration risk and other transaction costs can be overcome to create effective collaborations for addressing complex policy issues. However, after over a decade of use, the framework is due for critical evaluation and articulation of its state of the art and science to better inform future scholarship. For this purpose, this article defines key concepts and formulates assumptions, as well as reviews the empirical contributions and longstanding limitations of the ICA framework. A robust agenda for future research is also outlined. To move forward, we believe ICA research should focus on the foundational core of the ICA framework, maintain flexibility in explanatory models, and expand the scope beyond the collective action problems at the local level.

Performance reporting in sunshine regulation is subjected to disclosure biases, because agents may game the regulation or encounter difficulties in complying. These biases limit the appraisal of the impact of sunshine regulation on performance. We investigate the behavioral causes of such disclosure biases by focusing on transaction cost economizing and opportunism. We provide an original methodology to take into account information asymmetries in principal–agent relationships. We focus on water utilities management in France. Our data set includes 795 observations covering water utilities and performance indicators characteristics. It allows for comparisons of revealed and observed performances and identifies different types of disclosure biases. Findings indicate that opportunism is a significant motivation for disclosure biases, while, unexpectedly, transaction costs are not a direct trigger of disclosure biases.

Coherence is pivotal to integrate governance and, presumably, to improve sustainability because of more coordination efficiency. The coherence of governance refers to the clarity and the compatibility of public policies and property rights. The institutional resource regimes framework put forward that integration also depends on the scope of uses regulated (extent). Coherence has been under-investigated in comparison to extent. Notably, there is no common avenue of appraising it. In this paper, we propose a typology of coherence and assess it through an operationalisation in the Swiss water supply sector. It offers methodological tools and theoretical developments contributing to the comparative analysis of these policy studies central aspects. The typology stands on the IRR definition of integration, and we introduce the relation of coherence to extent, which emphasises the impact of polycentricity and transaction costs. To put into practice the typology and assess the different types of coherence, we gathered data from 96 water utility managers in French-speaking Switzerland. Results indicate that extent-related coherence is troublesome while the discrete coherence of each public policy and property right reveal satisfying. Despite an increasing focus on horizontal issues (siloisation, intersectoral), we observe more coherence issues related to vertical aspects of the governance.

This article puts forward the notion of socio-technical resistance with an application to the regulation through performance indicators in the water sector. Governance failures are mainly explained by concentrating on governance design, considering regulation as a set of control mechanisms. We propose an alternative perspective by putting the emphasis on socio-technical resistance to take into account both human and non-human actors in the governance process. We observe the misuse of performance indicators by local actors in urban water systems in Europe to highlight the empirical significance of socio-technical resistance. Results support that socio-technical resistance is frequent and reduces significantly the reliability of the information gathered through performance indicators. Drawing on a new typology of resistance, we show socio-technical resistance is a dynamic combination of cognitive, interpretative, territorial, strategic, technical and structural factors. These results and the proposed notion underline a crucial limitation of public policies and regulation in the process of policy-instruments implementation and compliance. Empirically, it reveals particularly relevant to provide new insights on New public management and performance-based regulation, where measurement are crucial.

Coordinating and integrating different policies and public sector organizations is a major challenge for practitioners and a continuing topic of interest for researchers. This Viewpoint essay argues that research on this topic needs reorientation to provide better insights for practice and theory of policy making, as well as policy implementation. The authors offer four suggestions on how future research could advance: (1) combining existing conceptual and epistemological approaches more systematically; (2) complementing case studies and surveys with large‐N analyses and novel research tools and methods; (3) more systematic analysis of the causal mechanisms in policy coordination and integration; and (4) more thorough study of the real‐world impact of policy coordination and integration.

This article proposes a new theoretical explanation to the question of environmental governance failures, combining micro and macro explanations in the long run. We put forward the concept of Transversal Transaction Costs (TTCs) as a critical source of governance failures. TTCs are transaction costs induced by interlinkages between public policies and property rights, an area under-investigated by the natural resources governance literature. We emphasise that TTCs are consequential in limiting the ability of environmental governance to coordinate natural resource uses. Drawing on institutional complementary and cluster literature, we argue that TTCs increased significantly over the years shaping governance evolution at the macro level in the long run. We show that institutional resource regimes tend to get locked into an Institutional Complexity Trap (ICT), which prevents improvement in coordination capacity and explains the persistence of environmental governance failures. Four cases substantiate our conceptual proposition of transversal transaction costs. In addition, the process-tracing of six water governance cases in Europe from 1750 to 2004 provides empirical support to the macro dynamics of institutional complexity trap.

International audience; Electricity access has become a crucial issue in global South cities. While demand is growing, conventional grids are failing or insufficient, especially in Africa. Urban dwellers therefore have to develop a wide range of (in)formal infrastructures to meet their daily electricity needs. Building on recent studies on urban electricity in the global South, this paper aims to contribute to the debates on hybrid forms of electricity provision by analysing the diffusion of solar panels and generators in two cities, Ibadan in Nigeria and Cotonou in Benin. Although neighbouring and relatively similar, these two cities illustrate distinct daily electrical lives. In Nigeria, an electricity-exporting country, people face daily power outages. In Benin, a country that depends on Nigeria for its supply, there is electricity but it is difficult to connect to the grid because of connection costs. Based on an empirical study, the article shows that Ibadan's inhabitants use generators as a complement to a conventional grid that is almost universal but unreliable. In Cotonou, solar energy is an alternative until they can connect to the grid. Generators and solar panels have become the material markers of urban Africa, providing information on inequalities in access to electricity.

L'Afrique connaît aujourd'hui une croissance urbaine rapide qui se traduit par une multiplication des constructions en béton. Le ciment, composant essentiel de ce matériau, est devenu le symbole de cette urbanisation frénétique qui bouleverse le paysage des villes africaines. Plus qu'une simple matière inerte, il se charge d'affect et de valeurs et redéfinit les pratiques et les imaginaires de sociétés en quête d'émergence économique et de réussite sociale, alors même qu'à l'heure du dérèglement climatique des voix s'élèvent pour dénoncer une industrie cimentière aux effets destructeurs sur l'environnement. Pour comprendre la production et la consommation grandissante de cette poudre banale devenue «or gris», Armelle Choplin nous invite à suivre les sacs de ciment sur les routes ouest-africaine, le long du corridor urbain de 500 km qui relie Accra, Lomé, Cotonou et Lagos. Depuis la carrière de calcaire jusqu'à la parcelle en chantier, l'auteure nous amène à la rencontre des géants du secteur, des investisseurs, des acteurs politiques mais aussi des maçons et des habitants qui construisent leur propre maison «en dur». À travers l'exploration d'une filière au cœur de multiples enjeux politiques, sociaux et économiques, cet ouvrage nous appelle à repenser les rapports étroits qui lient l'urbain, l'humain et le monde

Responding to recent studies that have argued that urban regime analysis (URA) is inappropriate for studying urban politics in Europe or in the twenty-first century, this article argues that URA is a powerful analytical tool to understand the dynamics of contemporary urban governance. It does so by drawing on evidence from the Swiss cities of Zurich and Bern since the turn of the millennium. In both cities, the realization of major urban projects has relied on strong public-private cooperation structured around the mobilization and exchange of five resources (“land,” “law,” “money,” “expertise,” and “democratic support”). Drawing on this empirical evidence, the article concludes by presenting two types of regimes: the PRIVATE-public regime and the PUBLIC-private regime.

Despite a progressive increase of land value redistribution instruments anchored in federal and cantonal legislation, the implementation of developer obligations (DOs) and more broadly land-use planning legislation in Switzerland remains largely dependent on the local political context. This is reflected in the 2014 revision of the Federal Spatial Planning Act (FSPA), which introduced a value recovery mechanism whose implementation greatly varies among cantons and communes. As a result, the implementation of DOs largely remains case dependent. We show this phenomenon through a comparison of three urban projects promoted by the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), where the negotiated obligations vary importantly across the cases. We find that the level of politicization of urban projects impacts significantly on authorities' willingness to negotiate DOs with the developer. A moderately politicized environment seems to be the most accurate configuration to implement DOs in Switzerland.

Sébastien Lambelet explique qu'accepter l'initiative contre le mitage contribuerait à accentuer le phénomène, au lieu de le résorber

International audience; Understanding the diversity of urban water regimes in Europe require dealing with governance instruments, actors strategies and institutional environment. To embrace it, we propose a typology of synchronous urban water regimes delineating four ideal forms. We highlight how actors strategies are embedded in institutional regimes and how sustainability perspectives depend on this urban configuration. It gives insights on sustainable transitions: their feasibility, constraints and opportunities.

This contribution focuses on the discrepancies existing between general frameworks defined at the international level and the need for the implementation of context-specific arrangements to solve water management challenges at the transboundary level. Relying on an institutionalist perspective and on a qualitative methodology, we analyse how international law is implemented, completed and instrumentalized at the transboundary level. We focus on institutional crafting (Ostrom 1992) to grasp harmonisation of uncoordinated legal frameworks. Analysing the process of defining institutions, we ask the following research questions: How international water law is materialized at the local level? How do stakeholders mobilize a legal framework in order to solve collective action problems at the transboundary level? How do institutions evolve and how are they continuously crafted in order to define a tailor-made and context-specific arrangement? We focus on a sediment flushing operated in spring 2012 on the dam of Verbois.

Performance reporting in sunshine regulation is subject to disclosure biases, because agents may game the regulation or encounter di culties in complying. These biases limit the appraisal of the impact of sunshine regulation on performance. We investigate the behavioral causes of such disclosure biases by focusing on transaction costs economizing and opportunism. We provide an original methodology to take into account information asymmetries in principal-agent relationships. We focus on water utilities management in France. Our dataset includes 795 observations covering water utilities and performance indicators characteristics. It allows for comparisons of revealed and observed performance and identi es di erent types of disclosure biases. Findings indicate that opportunism is a signi cant motivation for disclosure biases while, unexpectedly, transaction costs are not a direct trigger of disclosure biases.

La gestion des services d'eau urbains en Europe dépend d'une règle commune, la Directive Cadre sur l'Eau. Promulguée en 2000, cette directive européenne vise à moderniser et accroitre la soutenabilité de la gestion de l'eau en instituant des principes communs. Dans le cas des services d'eau, elle s'accompagne de directives sur les marchés publiques, la concurrence et la délégation. Malgré ce cadre commun, une diversité de modes de gestion perdure en Europe. En particulier, trois modèles embrassent la diversité des situations: anglais, français et allemand (du plus libéral au moins libéral). Quatre grandes tendances, absentes lors du développement des services et des réseaux, marquent l'aujourd'hui et le futur des services d'eau : la prise en compte de l'environnement, la baisse des consommations, l'étalement urbain et la privatisation. Il s'agit dès lors de comprendre comment les services d'eau actuels peuvent transformer leur organisation afin de faire face à ces changements structurels. L'objectif de cette présentation est de proposer un exercice prospectif sur la vulnérabilité relative de chaque modèle face à ces tendances. Comment le modèle allemand intègre le mouvement de privatisation alors que le modèle anglais repose dessus ? Quels sont les avantages et inconvénients d'une gestion reposant sur le marché et les incitations (Angleterre) en comparaison à une gestion publique et locale (Allemagne) pour organiser la pérennité des réseaux ? Pour répondre à ce type de questions, nous abordons trois thèmes centraux à la gestion des services d'approvisionnement en eau potable: les modalités de régulation des services, la gestion des réseaux et la participation du public à la décision.

International organizations and their partners often consider water security as a core notion of water governance strategies. Water security is, therefore, mostly addressed as a goal to be achieved. As the definition of a water-secure situation is still under consideration, and considering the lack of distance on the causal relationship between water security and sustainability, this normative perspective seems to be premature. We investigate the reciprocal relationship between water regime integration and water security improvement by focusing on two propositions. Firstly, an integrated water regime spontaneously leads to a water-secure situation. Secondly, water security represents a crucial trigger for water regime evolution by anticipating (a) issues in governance fitting and evolution and (b) new uses rivalries. We conclude that water security could be relevant as a tool for the adaptive management of a water regime.

The Institutional Resource Regime framework appears successful in comparing natural resource governance systems but unable to provide a common and persuasive explanation of the evolution of these systems. To fill this gap, the concepts of institutional complexity trap and transversal transaction costs (TTC) have been recently put forward. IRRs tend to fall into an institutional complexity trap which progressively reduces efficiency in regulating natural resource uses. These dynamics are the macro consequences of micro frictions in IRR extension, i.e. the transversal transaction costs. To date, the TTC concept has been mainly theoretical; the present paper examines its empirical relevance. We investigate dynamic causes of malfunctioning in poly centric systems focusing on interlinkages between extent and coherence. Materials come from case studies of urban water systems in Europe and Australasia. It allows us to propose a typology of TTCs and to highlight their impacts on the governance system. Finally, we are able to trace the pattern of evolution of an IRR in relation to the most likely institutional frictions occurrences. This has substantial policy implications, as we shed light on indirect but significant limitations to natural resource policy developments and adaptations.

La capacité d’action des gouvernements locaux augmente-t-elle lorsqu’une ville se trouve dans un contexte de croissance et diminue-t-elle en cas de déclin ? Certains auteurs répondent par l’affirmative, d’autres estiment que ce facteur n’est pas déterminant. Cet article souhaite élargir ce débat en analysant comment les gouvernements locaux peuvent mobiliser deux ressources d’action génératrices de capacité d’action : la maîtrise foncière et le soutien politique. En comparant les villes suisses de Bienne et Genève, il suggère qu’une longue période de déclin peut augmenter la capacité d’action, car elle facilite la mobilisation de ces deux ressources. Inversement, la croissance peut réduire la capacité d’action, car elle entraîne une sous-utilisation de la première ressource et complique la mobilisation de la seconde. Is the capacity to act of local governments increasing in a growth context and decreasing when they face decline? Some scholars answer affirmatively while others argue that this variable has no decisive impact. This article aims at broadening this debate and analyses how local governments can generate the capacity to act through the mobilization of land management and political support. Comparing the Swiss cities of Biel and Geneva, it suggests that a long period of decline can increase the capacity to act since it eases the mobilization of these two policy resources. On the opposite, growth can reduce the capacity to act since it leads to a suboptimal use of the first resource and complicates the mobilization of the second one.

The authors look at transformations affecting border spaces, by using the concept of the 'mobile border' to examine the growing dissociation between border functions and border locations. The book bears witness to the claim that de/rebordering and de/reterritorialization processes are not equivalent. It questions them through the analysis of 'borderities,' a concept built upon a close reading of the writings of Michel Foucault and derived from 'governmentality.' 'Borderity,' any technology of spatial or socio-spatial division, could be defined as the governmentality of territorial limits. Although initially defined as a technology of power,borderity may also appear as a differentiated social and political quality. The contributors examine the production of mobile borders (section 1: technologies), their incarnation (section 2: biopolitics) and their complex interpretation (section 3: 'dispositifs'). By looking at how political subjects can be disabled and enabled, the proposed 'borderities' approach illuminates the question of how borders can be the site of both power and counter-power.

Urban regime analysis has established itself as a dominant paradigm in the field of urban politics (Imbroscio 1998; Davies 2002; Davies 2003:253). Despite the variety of their concerns, nearly half of the authors contributing to the Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics (Mossberger, Clarke, and John 2012) refer to Stone's founding book Regime Politics. Nevertheless, over the last years, urban regime analysis has been the subject of increasing criticism. Some scholars argue that time has come to "bury it with honors" since its impacts in other subfields of political science prove to be rather limited (Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe 2007). Other scholars, including Stone himself, argue that regime analysis conserves its relevance for studying contemporary local politics if adaptations are made to its initial framework (Mossberger 2009; Burns 2015). Joining the second group of scholars, this article aims at identifying configurations of policy resources exchanges allowing the formation of urban regimes.

Quelles sont les ressources que les gouvernements des villes et leurs partenaires doivent mobiliser pour gouverner la ville du 21ème siècle ? Cet article introductif propose de revisiter le concept de pouvoir urbain en le considérant comme un enchevêtrement de jeux d’acteurs s’articulant autour du contrôle et des échanges de ressources d’action. Il élabore une typologie des ressources du pouvoir urbain puis applique cette grille d’analyse aux quatre études empiriques qui composent ce numéro spécial. Enfin, il présente cinq questions-clés afin de guider les chercheurs et les chercheuses qui souhaiteraient utiliser cette typologie pour des recherches futures. Which policy resources have to be mobilized by local governments and their partners to govern a city in the 21st century? In this introduction, we aim to revisit the concept of urban power by exploring the overlapping interplay between actors around the control and the exchange of policy resources. We set out a typology of resources for analysing urban power and then apply this framework to the four empirical studies that are included in this special issue. Finally, we present five guiding questions for scholars interested in drawing on this typology in further research.