The Institutional Integration Process: Coherence Issues, Policies Interelations and Long Run Dynamics

Policy integration is a central topic of policy sciences as it is as much supposedly promising for practice as hardly understood by theory. The framing assumption of this body of the literature is that policy integration leads to better policy outcomes. The success of this assumption might be due to its intuitive soundness, i.e., a better alignment between institutions, organization and policy objectives should induce better coordination. Therefore, since its first appearance in Underdal’s study of marine policy (Underdal, 1980), integration covers a constellation of concepts focussing on specific configurations (Candel and Biesbroek, 2016). More recently, the scholarship aims at bridging this fragmented knowledge to pave the way for a unified understanding of the “what’s” and “how’s” of integration (Bolognesi and Nahrath, 2018; Candel and Biesbroek, 2016; Cejudo and Michel, 2017; Persson et al., 2018; Tosun and Lang, 2017; Trein et al., 2018). This paper intends to contribute to this momentum. We adopt a regime perspective of integration to identify processes of the dynamics of governance (Jochim and May, 2010). A regime is made of public policy and property rights, and its integration is a function of its extent and the coherence (Gerber et al., 2009; Jochim and May, 2010; Vatn, 2005). Extent is the scope of regulated and coherence the quality of each regime components and of their interactions (Bolognesi and Pflieger, 2019; Cejudo and Michel, 2017; May et al., 2006; Varone and Nahrath, 2014). This paper aims at offering an explanation of regime integration in the long run as a function of extent and coherence. For the sake of accurate identification, we focus on public policies and exclude property rights from our analysis. While the literature focuses on the direct positive impacts of extent and coherence on integration, we put forward that extent negatively affects coherence, which indirectly limits integration. Further, we argue that this mechanism reinforces itself as the regime develops, creating an institutional complexity trap. The mechanism operates as follows. The regime develops by promulgating public policies to expands its scope and deals with new collective action dilemma. This increase of scope transforms into a policy accumulation process associated with more and more unexpected inter-policy interlinkages. It results in a complexifying polycentrism, which –at best- confines coherence and shapes a decreasing marginal impact of extent on integration. We show that this dynamic is structural and continuous while positive dynamics, such as learning process and Darwinist selection, are episodic. To feed this theoretical proposition empirically, we scrutinize the evolution of the Swiss flood regime from its starts in 1848 to 2016.