Institutional work in policy transfers: a case study of PPP adoption in Germany

In the early 2000s, German policymakers attempted to embed the United Kingdom's Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in Germany's public infrastructure field. During the transfer process a variety of public and private infrastructure actors in Germany used their regulative, normative and cognitive resources to facilitate or disrupt the implementation process of this foreign practice. The following chapter combines the policy transfer literature (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996) with the institutional work perspective (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). It demonstrates how the sequence of institutional work activities by German field actors resulted in a contentious adoption process, ultimately leading to a hybrid version of the PFI model in Germany. The findings encourage further research on political, technical and cultural activities of infrastructure field actors to better understand the institutional dynamics behind the adoption of the PPP phenomenon to different country contexts.