Exogeneity and convergence in policy formulation: Contested theories, approaches and perspectives

Policy formulation and its impact on institutional isomorphism is a complex and vexed area of scholarly inquiry. Institutions by their very nature often tend towards stasis, the internalization of practices, administrative procedures, patterns of thinking and policy approaches on the basis of path dependencies, institutional memory and patterned or experiential behaviour. The intersection between ideational formation, the role of policy learning and transfer, and the conduits via which policy is transmitted and absorbed into institutional contexts thus poses a myriad series of conceptual and explanatory difficulties when attempting to theorize institutional change and adaptation – why it occurs in some institutional contexts, fails to do so in others, or as is often the case dissipates unevenly across institutional spaces. The chapter critically explores the dominant schools of thought in relation to institutional isomorphism, why and how ideational formation occurs, how policy learning and transfer impact the formulation of policy, and in turn how these filter into institutional contexts. Copyright © 2017 Michael Howlett and Ishani Mukherjee.