The local governance of prostitution: regulatory drift and implementation capture

In this chapter we discuss the implementation of prostitution policy in Austria and the Netherlands. It introduces three key analytic concepts: policy implementation, policy design and policy instruments. Both Austria and the Netherlands initially had pragmatic, and in the case of the latter, progressive, national laws. Through analysis of the design and instruments by which these laws were put into effect at the local level, we observed a gradual change towards a more punitive, regressive approach. In the Netherlands this occurred through a process of regulatory drift, a gradual change in the focus and goals of a policy as the result of a succession of small decisions at the implementation level, without any formal decision at higher levels of political authority. In Vienna the mechanism was agency capture, the appropriation of the implementation process by one agency, the police, that imposes its own goals and operating procedures on the policy process. In both cases, the implementation process was driven by a logic of combatting trafficking that led to ever more intrusive measures to incapacitate and control an opponent that was perceived as powerful and devious.