The following paper deals with the issue of the Russian administrative reform of the 2000s. The subject of analysis is the relationship between the extent of inclusivity in the reform process and its outcomes. To study this relationship we start by focusing on the federal stage of the reform’s design, outlining institutions, involved actors and their strategies. We claim that due to the closed nature of the reform, its official Conception was highly incoherent. Following this, we turn our attention to the implementation of the reform in the Russian regions. We illustrate this process by outlining one case of the reform in the Republic of Karelia, based on interviews with representatives of bureaucracy, civil society and the expert community. Here we also demonstrate that greater engagement by interested groups results in better implementation of reform. Then we introduce simple regression to trace the relationship between two major directions of administrative reform – one based on the new public management idea of cost efficiency and the other grounded in the public governance call for greater community participation. Our model shows that these directions are hugely contradictory due to the logical incoherent Conception of the reform. We suggest some possible solutions to deal with this problem to some extent, which will require an even broader set of actors involved in the reform process. Therefore, looking at examples from the federal and regional dimensions of the Russian administrative reform, we argue that a more open regime with in a policy subsystem with a broader circle of participating actors will lead to a more coherent content of policy change and better implementation of the initial conception.