Hybridity and integration in local collective action: an analytical framework

Abstract

Can an integrated territorial approach successfully do away with the silo structure that marks public action through the hybridisation of sectoral logics? Drawing from various strands of research, as well as an assessment of multiple studies on the impact of integrated territorial approaches on local social development, this article develops an analytical framework to address this question. We argue that integration takes place according to four regimes, whose dynamics range from the simple juxtaposition of sectoral organisations to a hybridisation of their organisational logics. The regimes we identify are operational networking, interstitial effervescence, collaborative accommodation and institutional convergence. Each emerges from an interaction between the specific dynamics of each experience in a given milieu and supra-local socio-institutional processes, which generate new ways of conceiving and organising the coordination of public and collective action at the local level. Points for practitioners This article puts into perspective the virtues of the integrated approach as an antidote to public administration silos. An integrated approach to local action only produces the expected effects if each public agency agrees to transform its organisational culture and to direct its action according to the evolution of local ecosystem processes of change in the milieu as a whole.