How Administrative Traditions Shape Policy Experiments in European Nature-Based Solutions

Public administrators are empirical experimenters by nature. This paper argues that policy experiments are functions of administrative institutional settings. These administrative traditions influence bureaucrat-led policy experiments. This argument is explored through the case of nature-based solutions in the European Union; a field that is reporting increasing policy experimentation across diverse geographies and across four of the archetypal administrative traditions. Our review of this nascent literature revealed 19 sources across multiple different disciplinary sources. These revealed that the Nordic tradition is effective due to its culture of discretionary risk taking in experimentation; the Rechtsstaat tradition supports longevity in policy experiments; and the Westminster tradition facilitates broad and inclusive experimental spaces. This offers significant new contributions to the tradition and policy experimentalist literature. By drawing out the relevance of heterogeneous institutional administrative settings on experiments, it adds to the growing discourse evidencing the policy impact of administrative tradition literature and showing why nature-based solutions in the EU have significant empirical value to these policy and administration literatures.