Administrative clientelism and policy reform failure: the Western Canada Integrated Land Management experience 1990–2015

Policy scholars can learn a great deal from students of clientelism with respect to the forces at work in the policy process. This is apparent, for example, with respect to scholarship in recent years which has focused attention on the idea of replacing patchworks of public policies in specific issue areas with more coordinated or ‘integrated’ policy strategies (IS). In theory, such strategies should display a judicious mix of policy goals and means which can produce policy outcomes matched to specific large-scale problem contexts. Empirical work on such strategies, however, has shown the resilience of pre-existing policy elements often leading to reform failures and/or sub-optimal outcomes from such efforts. This article examines a case study of large-scale policy reform efforts in the area of Integrated Land Management (ILM) in Western Canada which reveals the role played by policy clientelism in blocking efforts to enhance policy integration in this area. This finding is significant in pointing out more generally the role played by clientelism in preventing successful policy reform.