Institutional design in networks: Elaborating and analysing strategies for institutional design

Abstract

There has been a lot of attention to governance in networks lately. Given the assumption that actors are dependent on each other empirical and theoretical research has been done how actors interact with each other how complex decision processes take place and how these processes can be managed (Rhodes, 1997; Kickert - Klijn - Koppenjan, 1997; Marsh, 1998; Mandell, 2001). In these publications a lot of attention has been paid to the difference in perceptions between actors, their various interests and their conflicting strategies. The institutional features of networks however have received only limited attention. Most of the attention has been on the interaction patterns between actors. These analysis however have rarely been connected to the question how we can manage network characteristics and what limitations we face here. This in spite of the fact, that in practice we encounter a lot of attempts to change institutional features of networks. In this paper we focus on the institutional characteristics of networks.