Collective actors and potential alliances for eco-social policies in Germany

Abstract

To break the vicious circle of mutually reinforcing climate and social crises, there is a rapidly growing literature around integrated public policy instruments called eco-social policies. The actors potentially drive such policies in public debate and the policy process remains under-researched. This paper elaborates on the positioning of various non-state actors on eco-social policies and potential alliance-building in Germany. It derives hypotheses from the existing literature on the role of trade unions, social- and environmental non-governmental organizations, and social movements in eco-social transformation. It tests them empirically on a dataset of public communication and uses a combination of computer-assisted text-analytic tools, namely text mining and structural topic modeling. The findings indicate that although eco-social themes as cross-cutting issues offer good conditions for alliance-building, actors differ widely in their potential to do so. Based on actors’ eco-social broadness and transformational intensity, the paper finds four clusters: a status quo supporter, an activist, a pragmatic, and an eco-social alliance cluster and discusses possible strategies for them. The findings highlight the relevance of service sector unions and social non-governmental organizations as they could act as a bridge to connect social and ecological interests. The paper’s contribution to the Special Issue is twofold: It addresses the policy dimension by examining what issues actors raise about ecological and social concerns. In terms of politics, it gains insights into actors’ positioning and their strategic alliance-building. Both shed light on the potential for eco-social change.