The role of policy instruments in structuring participation processes: the use of mayoral orders' within social services in the city of Milan

The institutional structure and policy instruments have a key role in all phases of participation within policy process: the former specifies the way the social space is organized, the latter regulates the way actors play and pursue their interests. In the past few years some urban security issues have been raised both at national and local level, and have been included in policy agendas. In 2008 after a press campaign the city of Milan starts addressing social issues involving the use of public space, specifically alcohol and drugs consumers and street sex workers. The Mayor opts for the use of a repressive device composed by three urban security mayor's orders with the aim to use them to underpin the cooperation among social workers of third sector and local police forces. Within this institutional framework only some third sector organizations accept to participate to the last step of policy design where the operational guidelines were defined. In this case study the key question address how the participation process has been structured by a securitarian institutional framework, what kind of practices came from it and which was the impact of them on the organizational field (Powell, Di Maggio 1991) and on the policy process (Lascoumes, Le Galès 2007). This policy has been analyzed focusing on the underlying logic of those instruments that define its vary institutional framework. The regulation of complex social issues based principally on public intervention of a single type of policy instruments (the mayor order), the underlying securitarian logic of these instruments and the lack of reflexivity that these instruments bring with them have led to a distinctive political dynamic. Focusing on the policy instruments and considering them as institutions (Lascoumes, Le Galès 2004) is possible to stress how the organization of social space can affect the behavior of both actors that were included in the participation process (even if with a strict margin of discretion) and those that were excluded. What emerge is a twofold dynamic that has structured the reaction of the actors in the organizational field in two opposite pole, provoking a cleavage between ethic and strategic actors. Another distinctive dynamic took place during the implementation phase: the group of third sector organizations involved in sex-workers' equipe felt in an impasse dimension; the organizations that have worked with addiction problems acted a decoupling strategy during their participation in the policy process. From a theoretical perspective the results collected with this case study permit to clarify the specific role of the broad institutional context, the position of the actors inside the policy network and the centrality of policy instruments in structuring the concrete practices in the participation process.