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, Klijn & Koppenjan, 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
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, referendum, 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 interactive policy making?
The article propose, 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
public administration literature. Subsequently, the model has been used to analyzed a pilot
case study as a preliminary step of a broader multi-case research project. Here we present for
discussion the conceptual model and the results of the test on the pilot case study.
