How Administrative Traditions Shape Policy Experiments in European Nature-Based Solutions

Abstract

Public administrators are empirical experimenters by nature. This paper argues that policy experiments are functions of administrative institutional settings. These administrative traditions influence bureaucrat-led policy experiments. This argument is explored through the case of nature-based solutions in the European Union; a field that is reporting increasing policy experimentation across diverse geographies and across four of the archetypal administrative traditions. Our review of this nascent literature revealed 19 sources across multiple different disciplinary sources. These revealed that the Nordic tradition is effective due to its culture of discretionary risk taking in experimentation; the Rechtsstaat tradition supports longevity in policy experiments; and the Westminster tradition facilitates broad and inclusive experimental spaces. This offers significant new contributions to the tradition and policy experimentalist literature. By drawing out the relevance of heterogeneous institutional administrative settings on experiments, it adds to the growing discourse evidencing the policy impact of administrative tradition literature and showing why nature-based solutions in the EU have significant empirical value to these policy and administration literatures.

1. Summary

An idea is true if it ‘works’—if it has desirable effect when tried. It places emphasis upon experience and is hence characterised by empiricism. Intelligent use of experience in testing for truth is an experiment; so ‘experimental is a term frequently found in pragmatic writings.

Dwight Waldo—(1948, p. 85)

This article is based within the sociology of public administrative systems. It explores how these systems of rich and complex ‘administrative traditions’ [1,2] affect the policy-making process in and around European nature-based solutions (NBSs) [3]. These NBS approaches are increasingly understood as critical interventions to meet multiple normative sustainability agendas such as nature restoration, climate resilience, and pollution control [3,4]. NBS policy experiments are an increasingly key plank of European Union (EU) sustainability efforts and agendas [4]. As Sengers and colleagues’ meta-analysis evidences [5], sustainability transitions necessitate policy and governance experiments for the purpose of trying new approaches, finding out what works, and situating new approaches within often crowded governance spaces. In addition, as Kooiman argues [6], the bureaucracy (e.g., public administration) remains, even in the age of new public management and plural governance, the linchpin of effective policy and governance for sustainability [4]. Indeed, these new NBS approaches are concomitantly having to manifest in congested and complex governance spaces [4] that are subject to national/place-based administrative or bureaucratic institutional and sociological phenomena. This is described as the ‘administrative traditions’ that fundamentally shape and discipline the organic qualities of governance through bureaucracy [1,2]. Therefore, understanding why and how administrative traditions affect policy experiments is an important scholarly endeavour [2]. More specifically, how this dynamic affects sustainability transitions and European NBSs is an important and timely topic for this journal [7]. Based on and within the logic and rationale set out in the next three sections, this article reviews 19 sources from a diverse research literature and asks how archetypal administrative traditions are affecting European NBS policy experiments.

2. Introduction: Policy Experiments and Administrative Traditions

Dwight Waldo famously argued [8] that public administrators are driven primarily by a pragmatic need to find what works. This makes administrators rational empiricists by nature and pragmatic experimenters in practice. This is an argument evidenced in later works on the deep roots of empirical experimentalism in public administration literature and theory [9]. Recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of accounts of administrative experimentalism, what Hutiema et al. [10] describe as the ‘experimentalist turn’ that spans and bridges the fields of public policy and administration [11,12]. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of a small but insightful intersectional experimentalist public policy and administration literature [13,14,15]. This literature has tended to focus on issues of learning [16,17], autonomy [18], and adaptivity [19] at the policy experimental/administrative tradition intersection. Often undertaken on decentralised scales, policy experiments offer opportunities for temporally and spatially limited trials with limited cost and risk profiles [20]. This literature argues that experimentation has been increasingly popular with policy makers in the interest of addressing complex and intractable policy problems [19], such as the provision of social welfare (see: [21]) or policy for natural resource allocations and trade-offs [16].

A challenge arises where this experimentalist literature tends towards monolithic conceptions of the institution of modern public administration(s). There are, of course, many good reasons for this—such as the homogenising forces of globalisation ([22,23], pp. 248–250), managerialism [24], and Europeanisation [25]. However, these homogenising forces fail to account for the institutionally ‘sticky’ [26] nature of public administrative systems that are as different as the states, peoples, polities, and cultures they represent ([27], pp. 52–66). Institutionalist and interpretivist accounts of public administrations consider them socially constructed sociopolitical constructs that vary depending on the institutional forces that historically and contemporarily shape them. This sociological notion of institutional variability in administrative forms is captured neatly in the theory and literature of administrative traditions. Whilst there have been several iterations of administrative tradition that accentuate different variables/cleavages (see: [13,28,29]), here, Painter and Peters’ text Tradition and Public Administration ([30], pp. 3–30) is utilised. Painter and Peters [30] argue that administrative traditions are fundamentally sociological phenomena that represent and manifest heterogeneous approaches to bureaucracy that exist in different places and polities. They conceptualise these heterogeneous approaches along three key variables—(1) history, (2) culture, and (3) governance experiences. By utilising Painter and Peters’ three-part conceptualisation, we can address the experimentalist policy literature’s deficit in accounting for different institutionally constructed administrative settings and, conversely, the administrative tradition literature’s deficit in considering how comparative traditions impact policy experiments. This paper bridges and addresses these lacunae.

This argument is contextualised and explored through dynamic and innovative literature exploring policy experiments for leveraging nature and natural processes to address the global climate crises [31,32], that is, the ‘actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems, (to) address societal challenges (e.g., climate change) effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits’ ([32], p. 7). These nature-based solutions (NBSs) are particularly attractive where they tend to offer a range of additional co-benefits beyond simply their stated objectives [33,34], as well as where NBSs are perceived as lower-cost than the engineered solutions of previous decades [35].

The past ten years have seen particular growth in the literature on the potential role of NBSs in the European Union (EU), catalysed by the adoption of NBSs as a priority area for research by EU Research and Innovation in 2015 [36]. Part of the promise of NBSs in EU settings is their potential to meet international climate commitments, build urban resilience through adaptation, and prioritise a host of co-benefits [36] through a lower cost suite of solutions that have the added benefits of being more open to citizen participation [37], equity [38], and justice [39]. For example, NBS policy experiments might include public funding and planning support for retrofitting urban green roofs for multiple ecological and social co-benefits [40] or mandated agricultural set-aside margins for biodiversity, soil health, and carbon sequestration.

The EU is comprised of states and bureaucracies with archetypal administrative traditions—the ‘common European legacy’, as described by Painter and Peters [30]. Europe has historically been a source of significant historical administrative innovation and is comprised of an intersecting and overlapping constellation of administrative traditions [30]. This heterogeneity offers diverse and rich comparatives for exploring the relationships between policy experimentation under administrative traditions.

This paper shows how and why policy experiments are contingent upon the administrative tradition of the bureaucrats leading, participating in, and shaping the experiments. In addition, it shows that the history, culture, and governance experiences of public administrative systems, as well as their deep and sticky institutional legacies [30], play a significant role in shaping these policy processes. This speaks directly to administrative tradition literature and scholars by offering a new application of theory in policy practice. It evidences the critical importance of the institutional administrative dynamics of contemporary policy. It also speaks to policymakers considering the scaling up of NBS policy experiments and challenges them to critically consider how administration will affect how experiments translate into programmes and legislation.

3. EU Nature-Based Policy Experiments Under Four Administrative Traditions

Of the nine core families of administrative tradition that Painter and Peters [30] offer, four of these are core to what they describe as the ‘Western’ archetypal forms and can be used to conceptualise the principal European traditions. These are the Westminster, Napoleonic, Rechtsstaat, and Nordic archetypal traditions. Naturally, these are ideal types of administrative traditions. However, the majority of EU states can be characterised in terms of hybridised forms [41]. Similarly, when considering these four ideal European types, it is important to note their appropriative histories from the older East Asian (especially Confucian Chinese bureaucracy) and Islamic administrative traditions ([27], pp. 52–54). This paper adopts a normative perspective on the role and functioning of the four ideal types of European administrative traditions as a tool to illuminate their power in shaping NBS policy experiments.

As noted, Painter and Peters’ [30] interpretivist and institutionalist conception of administrative traditions is based around the three intersecting dynamics—history, culture, and governance. Historical institutionalism offers a clear and cogent series of arguments for how institutions emerge from and are embedded in concrete temporal processes [42]. It tends to orient analysis around temporal concepts such as critical junctures, path dependencies, intercurrence, and modes of institutional change [43]. Painter and Peters [30] build on these understandings by positioning temporal influences as a determinant of traditions in public administrations. Similarly, they note how different cultures have varying affinities towards bureaucracy. For example, Waldo [8] uses culture as a tool to describe the emergence of US bureaucratic character in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Others highlight how the culture of society places expectations, establishes norms, and influences the frames of bureaucrats within traditions [44]. Painter and Peters ([30], p.5) describe the role of culture in shaping tradition:

“societies that stress egalitarian or individualistic values are much less likely to find the formality of a Weberian bureaucracy an acceptable mechanism for organization, whether in the public or the private sector. Likewise, a more hierarchical society, and its administrative system, may find adjusting to many of the changes in contemporary management that stress participation and involvement of lower-echelon workers and clients to be inconsistent with their ideas of good management.”

Finally, Painter and Peters’ concept of administrative traditions [30] is rooted in the patterns of governance; that is, administrative traditions are mere components of wider state traditions, and the administrative tradition is, in fact, a function of formal and informal interactions between various state and non-state actors.

These three connected perspectives of administrative tradition help elucidate how administrative traditions are institutionally constructed, replicated, and maintained. Although this paper is oriented towards interpretivist conceptualisations of administrative tradition, as outlined above, for comparative purposes, it distils specific definitions of four archetypal European administrative traditions to avoid what Russel and Serban ([45], p. 3) describe as a problematic mixing of interpretivist and positivist perspectives of administrative tradition. The questions presented in this paper are rooted in an interpretivist framing of administrative traditions and explored comparatively through somewhat stricter definitions of what comprises each tradition; see

Table 1. The four ‘European’ administrative traditions.

	Westminster	Napoleonic	Rechtsstaat	Nordic
Legal basis (for the state)	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
State and society	Pluralist	Interventionist	Organicist	Organicist; welfare; open government
Organisation of government	Limited government; weak local self-government	Hierarchical; centralised	Integrated; cooperative federalism	Decentralised administration
Civil service	Quite high status; unified; increasing politicisation of appointments; permanent; generalist	Very high status; permanent; specialised elite training; segmented	Very high status; permanent; legal training; openly partisan; permanent (at upper ranks)	High status; professional; non-politicised
History	Imperial	Imperial; Jacobin	Prussian; state building; federalist	Mixed
Culture	Plural; politics over bureaucracy	Liberty; high trust; high legitimacy	Hierarchical; statist; legalist	Plural
Governance	Anglo-Saxon common law; pluralist state–civil society relations	Roman civil law; unitary state	Civil law; prescribed

Derived from Painter and Peters [30] with author additions.

below.

In Table 1, each of the four archetypal traditions is characterised first in terms of the legal basis for the state, the relationship between state and society, the organisation of government, and their form of civil service. Secondly, Table 1 compares each tradition in terms of Painter and Peters’ core variables of history, culture, and governance.

The Westminster administrative tradition, from a European perspective, is the dominant tradition in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Republic of Ireland. The idea of the Westminster tradition is contested, and as noted by Rhodes et al. [46], it is perhaps best articulated by a series of common but blurred intersecting beliefs about constitutional arrangements, executive power, and party systems. Within a normative view of the Westminster tradition, the civil service is professional, high status, and dominated by permanent bureaucratic generalists. Furthermore, there is only a limited constitutional relationship between the state and the citizen. It tends towards limited government overall but relatively centralised administrative and policymaking functions. Accountability is held through political departmental Ministers [47], and power is dispersed throughout apolitical delivery agencies. The Westminster administrative tradition is a function of English history as far back as the English Civil War, the court of Henry VIII, the fourteenth century, or even further ([27], pp. 246–261). However, Weller and Haddon [48] and many others define the Northcote–Trevelyan report (1853) as the inception point of the Westminster administrative tradition. The development of the Westminster administrative tradition was also influenced by the Indian Civil Service and bureaucracy’s role as administrators of the British Empire [49]. Certainly, this tradition underwent a significant period of change following the Thatcher Administration’s New Public Management (NPM) civil service reforms of the 1980s. However, even these were not enough to substantively change the core institutional nature of the Westminster tradition, and as Cooper [50] suggests, it lives on through the institutional memories of permanent secretaries. The Westminster tradition can also be understood through the weak conception of the central state held culturally in the society of the UK. The culture instead emphasises governance as a shared endeavour between a limited state, markets, and civil society partners [51]. Arguably, since the rise of NPM, there has been a political–cultural aversion to an unelected elite bureaucratic cadre. Under NPM, there has been a shift in the pattern of governance towards a more explicit focus on public service provision [29].

The Napoleonic tradition is the dominant administrative tradition in France and has enjoyed wide global proliferation due to French imperial and colonial history, including in Spain, Portugal, and Greece [41] (e.g., hybrids). In France, it operates within well-articulated and codified state–citizen relationships and views its legal system as ‘an instrument of the state for intervening in society, rather than serving as a means of conflict resolution between different societal actors’ ([25], p. 65). It is an étatist tradition that ascribes to an organic state-citizen relationship with all manner of relations and interactions described and accounted for through its system of civil law, derived from the Justinian system by Emperor Napoleon I. This civil code offers a detailed prescription for the function and role of the bureaucracy in civic life, checked by a robust system of judicial review ([30], p. 21). Fukuyama ([52], pp. 337–354) argues that the chronic inefficiencies and injustices of the pre-revolutionary preceding ancien réegime bureaucracy necessitated the creation of the ‘new’ administrative tradition based on orientalist sentiments for the values of bureaucratic meritocracy, professionalism, and state-building. The Jacobin state has endowed France with a unitary, inclusive, and étatist political culture that emphasises the role of an active and interventionist bureaucracy in the lives and decisions of civil society, though less so in the everyday lives of citizens [41]. Its historical Jacobin cultural orientation towards professional meritocracy has influenced the emergence of an executive administrative class, selected and trained at elite educational institutions (grandes écoles). The clear codification of political and administrative roles in the Napoleonic code facilitates movement between the administration and politics, and therefore, there is a degree of politicisation in its administrative tradition.

The Rechtsstaat tradition is the predominant bureaucratic tradition in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and, most notably, Germany. This tradition is based on a statist and legalist conception of state–citizen relationships. Though the functioning of the state apparatus is highly prescribed through a civil law code, much like the Napoleonic tradition, it normalises and legitimises a heavy presence of the state in the everyday lives of citizens (unlike France) [30]. Fukuyama ([27], pp. 77–80) details the historical roots of the Rechtsstaat administrative tradition in Prussian state building in the eighteenth century. For example, Gorski [53] notes that when the Hohenzollern family converted to Calvinism (mid-1600s), it put them in conflict with their Lutheran nobility, which precipitated three major effects on the Prussian bureaucracy ([27], p. 69). First, to counteract the influence of their nobility, the Hohenzollerns staffed their new Prussian central bureaucracy with Dutch and Huguenot coreligionists, which imbued the bureaucracy with a culture of autonomy from, and superiority over, society at large. Second, it gave them cultural alignment towards puritanical values of personal austerity, thrift, and a hatred of corruption. It also precipitated the creation of a host of new Calvinist social institutions: schools, poor relief houses, parish record keeping, etc. These were, in time, institutionalised into the Prussian (and then German) state, laying the foundations for the social-administrative reforms of Chancellor Bismarck. This history and culture have gifted the Rechtsstaat bureaucracy an elite and hierarchical nature based within a values-based and ethical framework. As noted by Knudsen, it comprised:

“a highly bureaucratic, rule-bound and hierarchic structure designed to promote objective decision making on the basis of appropriate laws or regulations in obedience to the current government, whatever its political complexion”

([54], p. 37)

Rechtsstaat bureaucrats are said to enjoy a monopoly on expertise and are the prime intercession between state and citizens [30]. Governance under the Rechtsstaat tradition is both hierarchical and elite but also displays elements of plurality and collaboration derived from, as Painter and Peters [30] argue, its federalist polity, in which federal states enjoy significant power. This has a tendency to lead to horizontal administrative replication of departments and functions, though this is offset by the Calvinist values. For example, under the German Rechtsstaat system, many non-state corporations, organisations, and governance collaborations are given protected legal status (and state funding in places), leading to an institutionalisation of collaborative governance forms and offering the potential for checking, balancing, and regulating elite administrative interests.

The Nordic administrative tradition nominally accounts for administrative systems in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (and hybrids in Iceland, the Faroes, and the Baltic states). Whilst there are many commonalities that bind these state traditions together into this Nordic family [30], there are also many structural differences that differentiate them [55]. The Nordic administrative traditions combine an étatist and organicist inheritance with a strong focus on social welfarism (with similarities to the Rechtsstaat tradition) and a strong state tradition for consensual democracy through local government ([54], p. 96). The administrative traditions in these states share a strong sense of Rawlsian social egalitarianism [56] and institutional rights linked to citizenship [51]. The strong state foundation of this tradition adopts an interventionist and ‘directing’ administrative–state positionality in welfare and industry ([57], p. 9), with the aim of maximising employment opportunities and redistributive welfare policy in partnership with strong trade unions and civil society engagement in administration and governance. It has been argued that historical preferences for communitarianism and local democracies paved the way for the contemporary political and administrative Nordic culture ([54], p. 12). Greve et al.’s work [55,56] has found that the administrative culture across the Nordic states has a distinctly pragmatic perspective on governance and that the administrative culture generally encourages reform through layering and a general culture for administrative innovation, and as noted by Knudsen [54], relatively low levels of bureaucratic corruption. These studies concluded that the Nordic administrative tradition is inherently agile and adaptive, which in part contributes to the overall value of the ‘Nordic model’ and makes the Nordic tradition particularly well disposed to adaptive governance [58,59]. There are, however, also notable differences between the different Nordic states, which challenge the notion of a unified administrative tradition [30]. For example, the Swedish administrative system as set out in Ansell et al. [60] and Pierre [61], and arguably the ‘East Nordic (Finnish) tradition’ [62] and the Danish systems [63].

4. Expectations from Theory

Based on the characterisation of each of the four principal European administrative traditions, we can see that each is constructed from the intersection of their history, culture, and governance. The next task involves exploring what extant theory can reveal about how each tradition might influence NBS policy experiments.

The Westminster tradition has a diminutive view of the potential of the state and the capacity, competence, or function of public administrators in intervening in the innovation and operationalisation of policy experiments [30]. Certainly, within this tradition, there is an apparent culture of openness and inclusivity in governance for innovation and experimentation. However, simultaneously, it is relatively politically centralised, with limited decentralised power for risk-taking. The historic preferences are for governance through minimal state intervention. Instead, it seeks to crowd in voluntary and private sector partners and remove state actors as quickly as possible. This perception of legitimacy is based on private sector actors being subject to the laws of economics, which, under the economically orientated Westminster tradition, is culturally considered a higher-order driver of innovation than public administrators. Its focus (especially in recent decades) on ‘service delivery’ over ‘administrative structure and hierarchy’ suggests that it might offer increased agility across departmental silos for operationalising interdisciplinary NBS policy experiments. Similarly, theorising about the Westminster tradition [47] suggests that ministerial accountability should embolden administrators to take risks and innovate, which, when coupled with the service delivery ethos, could be beneficial for NBS policy experiments. However, this still raises the question of who starts and brings the early support (e.g., funding and partnership building) required for the operationalisation of policy experiments—it might be argued that Westminster public quangos with an interest in NBS might play this role. Congruent with the significant agentification of UK regulatory governance [3], this role might conceivably be filled by public agencies facilitating pre-packaged partnerships led by larger voluntary organisations. Critical to this, though, is that budgetary control under the Westminster system is problematic, as the state’s centralising tendencies, a function of national political culture and the history of the ‘United’ Kingdom, restrict local government discretionary funding to support new policy experiments, such as NBS policy experiments.

NBS policy experiments undertaken under the Napoleonic administrative tradition are likely to benefit from its culture of openness and inclusivity in the practices of governance. The state and bureaucrats at all levels are likely to adopt a strong leadership positionality in framing, shaping, and supporting policy experiments, yet nevertheless remain open to citizens and civil society actors both procedurally (in law) and substantively (in culture and governance). French bureaucrats, we might expect, enjoy substantial discretionary powers within the confines of the civil code to support and promote policy experiments. Moreover, their ‘elite’ position in French civic culture means that public administrators should be the integral components of NBS policy partnerships. The Napoleonic administrative–civic culture of interventionism should mean that public administrators are often integral to decision-making but in balance with the ideas and interests of citizens. Similarly, the relative budgetary autonomy of Napoleonic administrative regions should provide the scope for discretionary funding support, so long as partnerships for NBS experiments effectively engage public administrators. However, ‘engagement’ with the public sphere is a near certainty under the heavily prescribed and relatively centralised Napoleonic tradition. That said, this prescribed nature of governance tends towards administrative siloing, which has the potential to stymie effective experiments or hinder their translation into policy. Conceivably, the heavy siloing in the French system could also hinder effective funding and interdisciplinary partnership building, though these challenges of working across silos might be circumvented by advocacy or activist individuals moving between local/politics and administration and vice versa.

NBS policy experiments under the Rechtsstaat tradition are likely to be relatively prescribed and closed. That is not to suggest that they are elite; rather, the compositions will be more prescribed by the governance culture of prescribed and legitimate non-state actors. These should still fulfil the needs for inclusivity where the range of prescribed partners is inclusive of major stakeholder groups, but there is less scope for openness. Elite public administrators will likely play a central role in bringing together and supporting NBS experiment partnerships and exercise significant bureaucratic discretion (at more senior grades) in ensuring their longevity, crossing political–electoral timescales (a problem in the Westminster and, to a lesser extent, the Napoleonic tradition). Discretionary behaviours should be freer compared to the Napoleonic tradition; whilst both have civil law systems that mandate state–citizen relations, the Rechtsstaat tradition is relatively less prescriptive. The politics of NBS should be less pronounced under the Rechtsstaat tradition, where senior public administrators are more accountable to law and professional standards than politicians, which should make administrators more effective institutional champions for NBS policy experiments. However, the Rechtsstaat tradition is famous for its history and culture of strict hierarchies and departmental segregations, which could hamper adaptivity and agility in seeking to operationalise interdisciplinary NBS experiments. In addition, whilst the Rechtsstaat tradition does not enjoy as much of the advantage of activist administrator–politicians as the Napoleonic system, it does retain the potential for these to act as boundary actors in the service of working across administrative silos.

Despite the relative heterogeneity between the composite parts of the ‘Nordic tradition’, we can derive broad-brush expectations about how NBS experiments might fare under this tradition. The communitarian history and culture of the Nordic countries [57] suggest that NBS partnerships ought to be structurally open and inclusive. Nominally, under this tradition, it would be expected that the somewhat interventionist state and its administrators would play an active role in NBS experiments. However, the recent view of Bergholm and Bieler [64] cannot be ignored; as a tradition, Nordic administrations are increasingly mirroring the Westminster tradition with regard to positionality and the interventionist role of the state. Therefore, it might be expected that the state plays a less central role in shaping, framing, and supporting NBS policy experiments than imagined. Whilst there is evidence of departmental siloing in the Nordic tradition [65], these are not a constitutional or legal artefact of Nordic states, and so there are likely better cross-departmental policy experiments than in either the Napoleonic or Rechtsstaat traditions. The relatively high levels of public trust in the state and administration [58], coupled with higher levels of bureaucratic discretion based on professionalism and expertise, means that administrators have the potential to play key roles in the framing and delivery of NBS experiments. The relative budgetary autonomy at scales enjoyed under the Nordic tradition (ibid.), coupled with high levels of discretion, means that there is significant scope for administrators supporting experimentation for NBSs.

5. Method and Findings

This paper reviewed the emergent NBS literature to better understand how archetypal administrative traditions are affecting European NBS policy experiments across the EU. The emergent nature of this research literature across multiple disciplines suggests that a more ad-hoc snowballing literature review was likely to yield meaningful insights to address the core research conundrum/question articulated in the paper. The search engines Google Scholar and ScienceDirect were initially utilised, with search words related to ‘Europe/EU, ‘nature-based solutions’, ‘policy’, ‘administration’, ‘bureaucracy’, and some others. All returned sources had their abstracts read to determine whether they were in or out of scope. Potential sources were subjectively deemed in scope where they were saying something substantive at the intersection of NBS and taking a qualitative-interpretivist perspective on the bureaucracy/public administration of policy experiments. This led to 19 sources being discerned, as per Appendix A. This comprised 9 sources speaking strictly to NBS policy experiments under the Rechtsstaat tradition, 3 for the Nordic tradition, 2 for the Napoleonic, and 2 for the Westminster tradition.

These 19 sources were analysed considering the research question, and the comparative dynamics of different traditions were highlighted. It is important to note that these sources only offered empirical insights into the experimental phase of EU NBS policy experiments and made no reference to how different traditions might offer different advantages when experimental-phase policy turns into national-scale policy (as is the EU agenda). Furthermore, only some of these sources [33,39,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73] offered insights about strict, if oblique, iterations of four administrative traditions (e.g., cases from Germany, Sweden, and the UK), with the remainder offering insights from within hybrid traditions (Spain, Netherlands, and Belgium) [74].

From these 19 sources, we can explore and, to a degree, verify the expectations (given in Section 4) about the influence of administrative traditions on NBS policy experiments. The major sources that we can draw upon to validate expectations about NBS policy experiments under the Westminster tradition are from works by Frantzeskaki and colleagues [66,70]. These drew upon observations of experiments taking place in the cities of London, Brighton [66], and Glasgow [70]. In their attempt to create a framework for assessing and implementing the co-benefits of NBSs in the EU, Raymond et al. [33] offered some insights into the development of urban NBS experiments in London (UK). The early stages of establishing the ideas and partnership for developing the NBS policy experiments featured a strong local government presence, and the initial stages of partnership building were open and plural. Public partners appeared keen to draw in local small- to medium-scale enterprises (private sector), though there was a quick transition after setting up from substantive public involvement to the state (represented by the Greater London Authority) withdrawing from the experiment completely. Frantzeskaki et al. [70] reported on the case of urban NBSs in the Scottish city of Glasgow (UK). Arguably, the Scottish administrative tradition varies slightly from that of the UK, but not so much as to classify it as a hybrid variant. Similar to the London case, they reported an initial setup spurred by local government, coupled with a keenness and openness to engaging private sector partners early in the process of experimenting with NBSs. However, the process of successfully scaling up the experiment was reportedly hampered by structural administrative siloing, exacerbated by a lack of competencies and capacities in local government, which brought about ten years of political austerity. Frantzeskaki et al. [70] further reported a differential between a symbolic culture of openness and plurality, undermined by a structural governance path dependency for centralised government power. This meant that ‘substantive partnership building’ was difficult. Congruent with Painter and Peters [30] and others, these cases evidenced a strong locus of central government power coupled with low levels of confidence in the competency of public administrators [75]. The low level of administrative interventionalism was borne out where the public administrators were key to the inception of new NBS experiments but quickly exited partnerships and relinquished control to major private and voluntary organisations. Whilst there was an evident appetite for local-scale administrators to innovate and take on risks, they were constrained by their recent history of public austerity, which has hollowed out the UK public sector at all levels and reduced its ability to engage in governance activities [76].

Suleiman et al. [40] reported on the case of Barcelona, which operates administratively under a hybrid variant of the Napoleonic tradition. The three cases they report on were all initiated by authoritative public administrators, though subsequently funded through a range of commercial, citizen-based, and public means. Whilst other authors report on NBS policy experiments in France, none of these offered insights into how the administrative–institutional setting affected the experiments.

There is a relatively higher number of case-based reports on the administrative dynamics of NBS experiments in Germany [40,66,67,69,77,78] and the hybrid Rechtsstaat administrative states of Belgium [66,70] and the Netherlands [33,68]. In their reporting on urban NBS experiments in Dresden, Frantzeskaki et al. [70] discussed how German cultural norms for openness and inclusivity in governance and the structural ‘governance spaces’ that are made available for bottom-up civil society innovation were key to the success of their NBS experiments. Frantzeskaki et al. [66] commented on the German administrative culture for bottom-up initiatives striving to attract the attention and patronage of authoritative and influential public administrators, who held power over funding and support for longevity and prioritisation. Duskova and Haas [69], reporting the progress of NBS policy experiments in the city of Leipzig, found that many of the projects were initiated by either city administrators or civil society actors and groups and that such projects were funded by different public, institutional, and NGO sources. In exploring administrative funding mechanisms for NBS experiments across Germany, Droste et al. [64] discerned that funding mechanisms were well prescribed, with functions delegated from higher (elite) administrative actors to lower scales. This meant low levels of fiscal autonomy to support NBS in German municipalities, and NBS experiments often had to innovate around seeking funding and support for new NBS experiments or partnering with elite and influential public actors [79].

In the case of the Nordic tradition, the NBS policy experiment literature predominantly reports on Swedish cases in Stockholm [40,66] and Malmö [39]. This is problematic due to noted differences between different states within the Nordic administrative tradition and between ‘Sweden and the others’ [58] in particular. Thus, these cases offer a partial reflection about the Swedish administrative sub-tradition that we can use to, in part, draw conclusions about the wider Nordic tradition. Suleiman et al. [40] reported the experiment with urban rainwater run-off on Hornsgatan street in Stockholm. This experiment was led by the city council, which exercised significant discretionary powers in taking risks with new approaches to NBSs. This aligns with Ansell et al. [60] and Capobianco et al. [80], who speak to the Swedish administrative culture for discretionary risk-taking by bureaucrats. Frantzeskaki et al. [66] reported on how the administrative and governance cultures in Stockholm played an important facilitative role in the development of NBS experiments. Similar to Suleiman et al. [40], they reported that many projects begin with the strong support (financial and organisational) or that new community-originated projects exist within an institutional governance setting that encourages their engagement with public actors. Sweden is described as a relatively open and plural experimental space for NBS and one where decisions about the role of state engagement are decided through discourse and negotiation.

6. Discussion

The studies reviewed in this analysis revealed that in many (but not all) cases, policy experimentation for NBSs was contingent upon, and proceeded according to, the prevailing administrative institutional settings of place, polity, and culture. Overall, Painter and Peters’ [30] conceptualisation of administrative traditions, comprised of history, culture, and governance, offered a broadly effective analytical scope to capture the comparative nuances between the underlying institutional drivers of bureaucratic–administrative behaviour in these cases. Other conceptualisations within this field, such as Knill’s ‘instrumental’ vs. ‘autonomous’ cleavage [13] or Page and Wright’s ‘public authority’ vs. ‘service provision’ [29] would not, on reflection, have offered the scope to account for historical institutionalist forces that shape tradition ([27], pp. 52–66) or accounted for institutionalist pressures of previous bureaucratic decision-making in governance to create path dependencies on contemporary behaviour and decision-making in policy experiments. Thus, Painter and Peters’ [30] interpretivist and institutionalist conceptualisation of administrative traditions has clear analytical value in accounting for administrative behaviours in the exercise of policy experiments. However, the value of this approach likely has declining usefulness in hybrid administrative tradition settings, in which it is harder to specifically triangulate upon the key dynamics of the institutional administrative dynamics, as established in Table 1. For example, how possible was it to attribute bureaucratic decision-making around NBS policy experiments in the city of Rotterdam [65] to a function of its hybrid Rechtsstaat tradition, using an idealised form of the Rechtsstaat tradition (as per Table 1)? Trying to draw conclusions about the influences of hybrid administrative institutional drivers on policy processes appears, in this case, more tenuous.

The EU NBS literature was found to have variable usefulness in drawing out multiple cases of NBS policy experimentation under the four European archetypal administrative traditions. There was a heterogeneous spread of cases, with nine occurring under the Rechtsstaat tradition (or hybrid variants thereof), and only two in hybrid forms of the Napoleonic tradition [78]. Therefore, whilst this policy experimental literature brought value to this paper in terms of its dynamic and contemporary sources, the disparity in the spread of sources was problematic. This meant that the confirmation of administrative tradition theory about the Napoleonic tradition through NBS cases was lacking. This is not to suggest that other policy experimental literature might not have cases that could be used, only that the NBS literature offered little in this case. However, for those cases that were revealed through the review, there were some connections between the theory-derived expectations about the effects of administrative tradition on policy experiments and the case study of NBS policy experiments. Overall, therefore, it can be considered that the selection of the NBS literature had value in evidencing the relationship between administrative tradition and policy experiments. However, there is clearly scope for additional research to validate these findings, and especially relating to how the Napoleonic tradition influences policy experiments (and indeed other policy processes).

The sources reviewed evidenced how the Nordic administrative tradition shaped and facilitated smaller-scale (e.g., municipality-scale) policy experimentation. This was due to its culture of consensual democracy [54,61] and risk-taking by administrators, along with its history of an open and inclusive approach to governance. Many of the reported NBS policy experiments displayed the underlying administrative institutional forces of what Greve et al. [58,59] describe as a ‘pragmatic perspective on governance’ [39]. These were coupled to what Greve describes as the high levels of bureaucratic autonomy [55] within a wider administrative culture framed by Nordic high-trust polities, as well as adaptiveness in policy experimentation [60]. There were similarities in terms of openness of governance in the service of policy experimentation in accounts of NBS policy experiments in Rechtsstaat administrative settings. What Painter and Peters describe as the ‘monopoly of expertise’ enjoyed by public servants in acting between the state (and in particular state funding streams) and bottom-up policy experiments was borne out in the cases of Droste et al. [67], Frantzeskaki et al. [66], and Duskova and Haas [69]. However, this literature also highlighted how in Rechtsstaat administrative settings, there was a high (and competitive) threshold for institutional administrative patronage for policy experiments. However, once patronage was bestowed, policy experiments had significant institutional support longitudinally. The cases offered tantalising evidence of how institutional dynamics within the Westminster tradition influence NBS policy experiments. In these cases, such as those reported in Frantzeskaki et al. [66], in which in London Docklands, the NBS policy experiment was initiated by a partnership that included public actors, but these quickly extricated themselves to crowd in private-sector partners; this is congruent with Grube and Howard’s [51] perspective on the Westminster culture for governance. This case, and that of Glasgow reported in Raymond et al. [33], was congruent with the Westminster history and culture for non-interventionalism.

7. Conclusions

Waldo argued that bureaucrats are, in their fundamental decision orientations, pragmatic empiricists focused on ‘what works’ ([5], pp. 83–85) and so are naturally inclined towards experimentation. However, bureaucracies are not homogenous, and correspondingly, this paper set itself the task of making the case for how and why administrative traditions affect bureaucratic policy experimentation through an exploration of European NBSs. Our core findings and conclusions, therefore, must be that what we might expect from NBS policy experimentation under each of the archetypal traditions was broadly borne out in the various research sources analysed. This goes some way to answering the research question by showing us how NBS policy experiments in different European locales were being affected or operationalised in formats congruent with the administrative traditions in which they were occurring. Indeed, the rapidly evolving European NBS experimental policy environment proved an insightful body of research for this purpose because of the multiple accounts of NBS policy experimentation taking place under the four archetypal administrative traditions, rich with their own cultures, histories, and governing modalities. However, critically, the particular dynamics of place-based NBS policy experimentation by bureaucrats vary according to their institutional–administrative tradition [14]. This paper offers an initial perspective on this phenomenon in response to the research question.

There are limitations to this study. There were markedly fewer contributions in the NBS policy experimentation literature pertaining to the influences beyond the Rechtsstaat tradition on bureaucratic policy experimentation. Most EU-facing literature spoke about Germany (as a country) as opposed to the suite of states that operate under/within what might be called the Nordic tradition, though the relative paucity of Westminster tradition-facing sources (UK and Ireland) and the strict Napoleonic tradition (France) was harder to account for. Moreover, whilst this initial review of the literature offers a sense that the expectations from administrative traditions theory are being borne out in policy experimental practice, there is still a great deal further we could go in terms of validating what these results suggest. The limits of the research literature precluded (at the time of writing) a more systematic review of the literature, which could also be an important future step as and when the literature continues to grow with more and richer accounts. The relatively immature and emergent body of thought and theory that comprises ‘administrative traditions’ as a sociocultural lens offering thick accounts of place-based bureaucracies was also a limitation. The archetypes used here are crude, and any effort to assign positivist or deterministic interpretations should be avoided.

This paper’s primary contributions are to the individual administrative traditions literature [2,22,30,45], the experimentalist policy sciences literature [9,10,11], and the NBS policy and governance literature [3,4,33,36,37,39,40,74,75,78,79,80,81]. By presenting an argument about how normative conceptualisations of administrative traditions influence contemporary and highly salient policy agendas [14,63], such as NBS policy experiments, it highlights for the administrative tradition literature and scholarly community the impact of applying their theoretical insights to contemporary policy challenges. Similarly, it also speaks to policymakers and practitioners [3] considering the scaling-up of policy experiments [4] and challenges them to critically consider how sticky institutional forces that scaffold public administrations influence the delivery and translation of policy experiments into programmes and legislation. For the policy sciences scholarly community and literature, it evidences how and why experimentation is contingent upon sticky institutional administrative forces. The key message for policymakers and urban planners is that the sociocultural phenomena of administrative traditions need to be accounted for in the construction of future policy experiments for NBS, if not designed into them. We should also conclude that because bureaucratic institutions are place-based and socioculturally constituted, they will continue to exert influence on and shape all stages of the NBS policy-cycle across the EU from experiments to scaling-up.

We might also conclude that the sociocultural phenomena of administrative traditions affect all stages of the national policy cycle writ large. In addition, as such, this has wider implications for national policy and governance efforts towards meeting the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development agenda. There is an opportunity for public administration and policy scholars to engage with the implications of this conclusion through explorations in other policy spheres or administrative settings. For example, it might rightly be asked how sustainability-facing policy experimentation is influenced by the Confucian administrative tradition in China and its hybrid forms (e.g., South Korea or Vietnam), or what different administrative traditions in comparative settings might tell us about the effectiveness, impact, or role of policy experiments on national public policy.