Very often, public policy-makers are free to choose in how they design governance processes as more or less participatory: Choices on who to involve at what stage and with what effect may be based on the specific goals of decision-making or on prior experience on ‘what works’. Some have argued, however, that public policy-makers also tend to follow what has been termed administrative or governance ‘culture’. The concept of participatory governance cultures is based on the idea that institutional traditions, rationales and routines predetermine how administrative tasks are practiced. Following the notion of administrative styles as framed by Knill (2001), it goes beyond structural features and transcends the official rules of the game fixed in organizational statutes and law (Knill et al 2016; Knill and Grohs 2005). Participation and collaboration scholars have argued for stakeholder participation to become more institutionalized to overcome many of its own limitations by creating organizational cultures (Reed 2008; Fernández and García 2008; Richards et al 2004). Therefore, the conceptualization of participatory governance cultures seems viable to (1) enrich the theory of participatory planning through greater attention to the embeddedness of processes within wider administrative cultures and to (2) offer an explanatory model on variation in implementation processes within one policy field. In this paper, we aim to test whether differences in participatory approaches can be explained by variation in participatory governance cultures. To this end, we study participatory governance in implementing three European Union environmental directives in German federal states.
