ABSTRACT
The experience analyzed is therefore an exemplification of the fact that change may be more effectively induced in a political-institutional framework through prevailingly indirect, non-authoritative, informal ways, entailing significant components of decentralized initiative and participation ‘from below’, rather than through ‘constitutional’, hierarchical-conformative mandates of reform; it is, however, also an example of the strict interdependence of innovation and change with the determinants of the institutional settings (rules, routines, structures of roles and relationships, networks of communication). On the one hand, conditions for effectiveness and innovation are thus grounded in social practices developing through actual interactions, i.e. through on-going practices of communication, argumentation, negotiation and consensus-building, and on situated forms of self-organization and initiative, rather than on the mandatory forms of co-ordination. On the other hand, their development and fortune entails an on-going confrontation with aspects of the institutionalization of social practices. Conditions for policy effectiveness and innovation through argumentation, consensus-building and self organization stress therefore their coevolutive relationship with aspects of the institutionalization of practices.
