When reform comes into play: Budgeting as negotiations between administrations

In this article budgeting is considered as a game. It is analysed in an area of public budgeting that usually remains behind the scenes to research: the intra-administrative negotiating structures by which money is distributed. Taking the example of the highly indebted metropolis Berlin, the administrations were confronted with a politically initiated budget reform. The reform cannot be analysed detached from the already ongoing game. Moreover the reform did make new resources available to support, modify, and vary the existing ways of approaching the aim of the game: to retain or gain as much leeway as possible in the form of money. The ethnographic use of the game metaphor differs from the symbolic or instrumental approach to the subject of institutional change, by allowing analysis of how budget reform functions in the implementation process.