ABSTRACT
Societies organize public action via public norms and purposive action. The book argues that the legitimacy and effectuation of public action depend on the interaction of institutionalizing public norms and the experimentation of public aspirations via purposive strategies. However, the need to institutionalize public norms and to maintain and innovate their meaning in practice is increasingly ignored today. In order to underline the need of conceptualizing “institutions in action” (the aim of this book), this chapter highlights the problems of practices of public action that ignore the meaning of public norms. An overview of forty years strategic spatial planning in the Netherlands (the famous international model of planning) is taken to exemplify these problems.
