Designing Sameness? Policy Convergence and Template Governance in India’s Smart Cities Mission

Smart city programs are typically presented as vehicles for locally adaptive and innovative policymaking. Yet they often produce strikingly similar policy designs across cities facing very different challenges. This paper examines this puzzle through India's Smart Cities Mission (SCM), one of the world's largest urban transformation programs. The SCM sought to encourage local innovation, experimentation, and citizen-centred urban development. At the same time, participating cities were required to formulate proposals within a common architecture of planning templates, evaluation criteria, funding arrangements, and implementation structures. From the perspective of adaptive policy design, substantial variation would be expected because participating cities differed significantly in their geography, infrastructure conditions, administrative capacities, fiscal resources, and development priorities. Yet the analysis reveals a striking pattern. Cities confronting very different urban problems repeatedly converged around similar policy instruments, intervention portfolios, and planning narratives. The paper draws on an original dataset of 100 Smart City Proposals and more than 2,000 coded policy interventions across five sustainability domains: electricity, water, sanitation, rainwater harvesting, and smart metering. Combining NATO-based policy instrument analysis with computational text analysis, the study examines convergence in policy instrument mixes, intervention repertoires, and policy language. The findings reveal substantial convergence despite significant contextual diversity. Organizational and treasury instruments account for almost 90 per cent of all coded interventions, while regulatory and informational instruments play only a marginal role. Across domains, cities repeatedly adopted similar portfolios of smart technologies, infrastructure upgrades, monitoring systems, and centralized management arrangements. Text analysis further identifies recurring policy narratives, standardized design language, and clusters of highly similar planning formulations across geographically distant cities. Although some local variation exists, most notably in rainwater harvesting, evidence of extensive adaptive calibration and cross-round policy learning remains limited. To explain these patterns, the paper develops the concept of "template governance", defined as a mode of policy formulation in which standardized planning architectures, evaluation criteria, and shared design repertoires channel policy choices toward common solutions. Rather than viewing convergence solely as the result of policy diffusion, transfer, or learning, the paper argues that convergence can emerge through the institutional structure of policy formulation itself. The paper contributes to policy design scholarship by shifting attention from policy instruments to the design environments within which policy choices are made and offers a new perspective on how large-scale governance reforms may promote innovation rhetorically while simultaneously reproducing policy convergence in practice.