Abstract
Recent years have witnessed increased political interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional government sectors and levels, including climate change, food insecurity, terrorism, and the instability of financial markets. Public policy scholars have recently suggested to study such attempts by conceptualizing policy integration as a multi-dimensional process. Although such a processual perspective has helped to comparatively assess policy (dis)integration, the mechanisms of (dis)integration over time remain undertheorized. Past studies have reported a number of relevant factors, but these have remained rather functionalistic observations that lack explanatory value. To address this gap, we propose a mechanism-based approach that uncovers the political processes that underlie policy (dis)integration over time. Rooted in different strands of social science literature, the mechanistic approach offers a model of causation to assess the plausible chain of key processes that are triggered under particular contextual conditions. We illustrate the framework by empirically investigating the mechanisms that explain the policy (dis)integration of food and climate change adaptation policy in the Netherlands. We end the paper with discussing various implications of our findings for processual approaches to policy integration.
Highlights
Recent years have witnessed increasing scholarly interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to better govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional government sectors and levels (e.g., Peters 2015; Candel and Biesbroek 2016; Cejudo and Michel 2017; Peters 2018), including ‘wicked problems’ such as climate change (Mickwitz et al 2009; Adelle and Russel 2013; Runhaar et al 2018), food
‘integrated policy’ as a concept was already coined in the early 1980s (Underdal 1980), most early policy integration research focused on coordination between public sector organizations (e.g., Metcalfe 1994; Peters 1998; Jordan and Schout 2006)
These policy scholars have been primarily concerned with the extent to which crosscutting concerns have been incorporated into policy outputs across sectors, the underlying assumption being that the inability to realize such integration results in partial and ineffective responses
Summary
Recent years have witnessed increasing scholarly interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to better govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional government sectors and levels (e.g., Peters 2015; Candel and Biesbroek 2016; Cejudo and Michel 2017; Peters 2018), including ‘wicked problems’ such as climate change (Mickwitz et al 2009; Adelle and Russel 2013; Runhaar et al 2018), food1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Policy Sciences (2020) 53:61–84 insecurity (Candel and Biesbroek 2018), terrorism (May et al 2011), and the instability of financial markets (Gieve and Provost 2012). A second strand of literature has started from a policy problem perspective, such as environmental concerns (environmental policy integration; EPI), climate change (climate policy integration; CPI) (e.g., Lafferty and Hovden 2003; Jacob et al 2008; Jordan and Lenschow 2010; Adelle and Russel 2013; Runhaar et al 2014), gender (Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2010), and nutrition (Harris et al 2017) These policy scholars have been primarily concerned with the extent to which crosscutting concerns have been incorporated into policy outputs across sectors, the underlying assumption being that the inability to realize such integration results in partial and ineffective responses. One of the main insights of this body of literature is that political commitments to strengthen integrative efforts often do not proceed beyond discursive levels (Jacob et al 2008; Candel 2017), largely due to the same factors that were found by research on coordination, such as conflicting interests and lacks of genuine commitment
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