Navigating Institutional Friction: Governance Burdens in Hybrid Systems of Authority

ABSTRACT Existing governance scholarship often analyzes institutional dysfunction through either formal or informal lenses, emphasizing, for example, bureaucratic inefficiency on one hand or clientelism and informality on the other. Yet in many governance contexts characterized by institutional hybridity, governance challenges arise not merely from the absence of rules or enforcement, but from the overlap, contradiction, and collision between formal and informal logics. This article introduces a conceptual framework centered on the burdens and fatigue that citizens and bureaucrats experience when navigating fragmented, overlapping, and incoherent systems of authority. We further distinguish between different forms of hybridity, including multi‐actor governance overlap, formal–informal institutional coexistence, and jurisdictional instability, each generating distinct types of governance burden. Drawing on insights from street‐level bureaucracy and hybrid governance, our framework explains how the coexistence of partial formal authority and pervasive informal arrangements generates significant coordination costs. These costs manifest as governance burdens that can demobilize administrative capacity, exhaust civic engagement, and impair service delivery. Unlike administrative burden scholarship, which primarily examines frictions within a single institutional system, governance burden captures the additional costs of navigating multiple overlapping and potentially conflicting systems of authority simultaneously. By focusing on these coordination costs rather than institutional absence, this approach offers a unified analytical lens for understanding chronic governance inefficiencies and disillusionment in hybrid governance contexts across both developing and advanced institutional settings. The framework contributes a typology of institutional hybridity and a distinct concept of governance burden that extends existing work on administrative burden and street‐level bureaucracy.