Regulate or Be Regulated: The Institutional Entrepreneurship of Developers

Abstract

Zoning is one of the key roles of land use regulation by the state. In engaging with this land use regulation, developers do not stay put and passively await rules to be imposed upon them. Instead, they proactively seek to (co)produce new rules or change existing rules to their advantage: they are ‘institutional entrepreneurs.’ We analyze how institutional entrepreneurship strategies play out empirically in Rijnenburg, a large greenfield site located southeast of the city of Utrecht. We find a complex and reciprocal interrelationship between planning decisions on the one hand and strategies of developers on the other.