Policy Change Through Negotiated Agreements: The Case of Greening Swiss Agricultural Policy

Florence Metz,Eva Lieberherr,Aline Schmucki,Robert Huber

doi:10.1111/psj.12417

Abstract

Negotiated agreements are a promising pathway for policy change. This paper revisits and extends characteristics of negotiated agreements using the Advocacy Coalition Framework. We focus on two characteristics of negotiated agreements that previous literature has not explicitly addressed. First, we scrutinize the role of policy core and secondary policy beliefs in actor constellations. Secondly, we address partial success, that is, the notion that actors concede on some points, but in return succeed in others. We investigate these two characteristics in the 2014 reform of Swiss agricultural policy. Based on cluster and social network analysis, we exemplify how negotiated agreements embedded in a participatory policy process lead to a surprising level of policy change by promoting agricultural production practices with an intended positive effect on the environment. We show that rather than coalitions based on policy core beliefs, the formation of groups of actors based on secondary beliefs who span across the coalitions formed the basis for a negotiated agreement. Green and conservative groups were both able to achieve partial success. We conclude that insights from this exemplary case study should revive the concept and initialize a research agenda on negotiated agreements as a pathway for change in domestic policymaking.

Highlights

Finding agreement on a common policy is a major challenge for policy actors
Our in-depth case study of the Swiss agricultural policy reform shows how, in a participatory policy process, members of opposing coalitions make compromises at the level of secondary beliefs rather than policy core beliefs and we show how this leads to partial success
We find that compromise at the level of secondary beliefs formed the basis for policy change

Summary

Introduction

Finding agreement on a common policy is a major challenge for policy actors. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF)—a common policy process theory—introduced the concept of “negotiated agreements” as one potential pathway to policy change (Sabatier & Weible, 2007).. Negotiated agreements in the ACF involve policy changes that come about through consensus on a common policy by previously warring coalitions and in the absence of a major external or internal perturbation The concept has received scarce attention in the policy process literature so far, as very few applications exist (exceptions include: Bandelow, Vogeler, Hornung, Kuhlmann, & Heidrich, 2017; Heikkila et al, 2014; Kukkonen, Ylä-Anttila, & Broadbent, 2017). The goal of the study is to investigate the concept of negotiated agreements by asking: How do coalition constellations affect the success of negotiated agreements?

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Conclusion