Institutionalization of Governance and the Transition from ‘Fake’ Learning to ‘Real’ Learning: Dispute over the Modernization of a Wastewater Treatment Plant and an Incineration Plant

Abstract

The case illustrates the process during which a new participatory governance mode was being institutionalized within the organizational structures of the city, how it found its way through the established ways of thinking and acting, eventually becoming part of formal regulations at the city level. Initially, governance as an approach to public management was used above all instrumentally. Yet, even such ‘fake’ learning resulted in institutional changes, initially unintended by the subjects of learning. This unintended result emerged through the process of negotiations over meaning and power struggle. Observation of the process facilitates differentiation between learning as an individual and institutionalization as a meso-level phenomenon.

Once the project had been prepared, we held a meeting at the investors’ headquarters. The Mayor of the municipality was present. He made an emotional speech, saying that ‘no’, that they [inhabitants and municipality authorities] ‘do not agree [for the modernization]’. Back then I thought that this person was from another planet. How can one disagree?!

Regional Agency representative, interview, July 2007

A case described in this chapter was also subject of an analysis in a paper ‘Local government and learning. In search of a conceptual framework’ (Rządca and Strumińska-Kutra 2016).