Coalitions Of Actors Research Articles

Putting Ambiguity to Work: Biodiversity and Rules of Engagement for Vagueness in Science

‘Biodiversity’ is widely recognized as an extremely ambiguous concept in conservation science and ecology. It is defined in a number of different and incompatible ways in the scientific literature, and is also “exported” beyond the scientific community, where it may take on a host of other meanings for governments, policy-makers, non-governmental organizations, and the general public at large. One might respond to this ambiguity by either pushing for its clarification, and by extension the adoption of a single, univocal biodiversity concept, or by rejecting the term entirely, replacing it with a relevant, more precise concept in each context. In this paper, I argue for a third approach. Drawing on literature describing change in large organizations, I explore ways in which ambiguity might be seen as productive – as a manner, at the very least, in which we can enable action by a mixed coalition of actors with different and, at times, contradictory interests and value commitments. I explore how this literature – in particular, a taxonomy of rhetorical uses of ambiguous concepts – could enable us to put the ambiguity of biodiversity to work for us, offering us a way to intervene in conflicts about the concept by helping to develop both clearer descriptive analyses and normative “rules for engagement” in debates surrounding biodiversity.

Civil society coalitions in the EU media regulation: when field theory meets network analysis

ABSTRACT The field of Eurocracy has increasingly been shaped by the emergence of actors lobbying on the area of digital regulation, which has heavily increased during the Von der Leyen Commission. We study the extra-institutional actor networks that have been involved in the EU digital policy formulation, and hypothesise that beyond clearly visible networks of opposition, the subjacent social structure of discourse networks was dominated by Big Tech. We do so by analysing the role of actor coalitions that have emerged to channel specific demands and pressures in relation to the ongoing regulatory struggle, as well as the dominant discourse coalitions. Specifically, we use Social Network Analysis to examine the cooperation and competition patterns among the actors involved. Our work is relevant for the study of EU personnel in two ways. First, digital regulation is a pertinent example of dynamics in emerging fields, where dominating policy entrepreneurs establish discursive dominance over a long time. Second, our innovative methodological approach indicates why analysing organisational discourses are relevant to understand the networks that contribute to the structure of the EU field.

Procedural inclusiveness can mitigate trust challenges in environmental policymaking

ABSTRACT Decreasing political trust poses severe challenges, particularly in policy domains where solutions to societal problems are urgently needed. The reason is that low trust decreases citizens' support for policy interventions. Since trust is difficult to increase in the short to medium term, this study explores how negative trust effects on policy support could be mitigated through policymaking procedures. We connect literature on policy design processes and trust to argue that involving broader actor coalitions when designing a policy is likely to mitigate the negative trust effect on public policy support. We test this argument with an empirical focus on environmental policy, based on data from a survey experiment in Switzerland (N = 6116). Our study design combines a choice experiment with treatment conditions for procedural inclusiveness and various levels of policy stringency with a novel approach to measuring trust. The main finding is that greater inclusiveness in terms of engaging a broader actor coalition in the policy design process reduces otherwise negative effects of low trust on policy support. The main policy implication is that political trust challenges are not a predicament for failure in addressing urgent societal problems but can be offset by including broad actor coalitions in policy design processes.

(Un)usual advocacy coalitions in a multi-system setting: the case of hydrogen in Germany

Grand sustainability challenges span multiple sectors and fields of policymaking. Novel technologies that respond to these challenges may trigger the emergence of new policy subsystems at the intersection of established sectors. We develop a framework that addresses the complexities of ‘multi-system settings.’ Empirically, we explore belief and coalition formation in the nascent policy subsystem around hydrogen technologies in Germany, which emerges at the intersection of electricity, transport, heating, and industry and is characterised by a broad range of actors from different sectoral backgrounds. We find two coalitions: a rather unusual coalition of actors from industry, NGOs, and research institutes as well as an expectable coalition of gas and heat sector actors. Actors disagree over production, application, and import standards for hydrogen. However, there is widespread support for hydrogen and for a strong role of the state across almost all actors. We explain our findings by combining insights from the advocacy coalition framework and politics of transitions: Belief and coalition formation in a nascent subsystem are influenced by sectoral backgrounds of actors, technology characteristics, as well as trust and former contacts. Our study contributes to a better understanding of early stages of coalition formation in a multi-system setting.

The politics of carbon management in Austria: Emerging fault lines on carbon capture, storage, utilization and removal

With the proliferation of net zero targets in climate policy and corporate climate governance, the question of how to deal with greenhouse gas emissions considered hard-to-abate is attracting growing attention. In this context, the notion of carbon management has emerged on the political agenda – an umbrella term typically encompassing carbon capture and storage (CCS), carbon capture and utilization (CCU) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Here, we investigate the emerging politics around the design of a national carbon management strategy in Austria, a country which can be considered a yet understudied latecomer regarding CCS and novel CDR methods including BECCS and DACCS. Based on expert interviews with policy actors as well as qualitative document analysis, we identify four actor coalitions as well as key fault lines. These fault lines specifically relate to a) whether the CCS ban in Austria should be lifted, and b) which economic sectors get access to carbon storage and transport infrastructure as well as subsidy schemes (selective vs. unrestricted integration). We also find that framing CCS, CCU and CDR under the umbrella term carbon management produces specific coalitional effects while simultaneously concealing contested climate policy choices – a finding with wider implications beyond the Austrian case.

International actors and national policies: the introduction of the national care system in Uruguay

This paper aims to understand coalition building between national and international actors in the context of an emerging subsystem. In applying the Advocacy Coalition Framework to the case of Uruguay, where a new field of social policy – the National Care System – was introduced in 2015 after a process involving different national actors from academia, civil society, politics, and administration, but also United Nations agencies, the paper explores the role of these international organizations in coalition building, and examines how a dominant coalition of national and international actors shaped the development of the new system. Using interview data and documents, the findings suggest that the involvement of international organizations in the coalition was based on shared beliefs and personal and institutional relationships. While powerful opposing coalitions were absent due to the nascent nature of the subsystem, the dominant coalition was able to influence the policy’s introduction based on their beliefs regarding gender equality and rights.

Exploring the eternal struggle: The Narrative Policy Framework and status quo versus policy change

This article proposes an integration of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) with prospect theory to investigate how the status quo and policy change are recounted in public debates. By integrating insights from prospect theory into the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), we investigate narratives in the policy domain of farm animal welfare, which is characterized by a strong polarization of actor coalitions. We compare public debates in France and Germany between 2020 and 2021. Our analysis shows that the NPF’s analytical strength is enhanced by integrating the distinction between status quo and policy change in narrative elements. This distinction enables further empirical nuancing of actors’ narrative communication, and in combination with insights from prospect theory, it allows for new conjectures about actors’ use of narrative strategies such as the devil shift and the angel shift. In addition to the theoretical contribution, we shed light on debates surrounding farm animal welfare in Western Europe: Both animal welfare and agricultural coalitions are unsatisfied with the status quo, but they promote policy change of different kinds.

Challenging agricultural norms and diversifying actors: Building transformative public policy for equitable food systems

Food systems governance regimes have long been spaces of “thick legitimacy” (Montenegro de Wit & Iles, 2016), where embedded norms benefit pro­duc­tivist agricultural practices. Within governance regimes, the science-policy interface and the scien­tists who occupy this space are integral in today’s public policy processes. Often treated as objective science, technical disciplines have become a power­ful source of legitimatizing in decision making. Without the contextualization of lived experience or diverse ways of knowing, these siloed spaces can lead policymakers towards an action bias (e.g., a rush to short-term solutions) that neglects the underlying causes and concerns of our current crises. Current governance arrangements in the science-policy interface demonstrate the bias toward technical science (e.g. economics) and short-term solutions. However, by challenging productivist agriculture norms reformed public policy processes may shift from a space of repres­sion to one of possibility. This reform can happen through investigatiing dominant actor coalitions and identifying tools to reconfigure these power arrangements. Public policy theory, such as the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), helps organ­ize relations within current agricultural policy arenas. The work of practitioners and other disci­plines offer tools that can support transformative action by food systems advocates in the pursuit of changing the way public policy is made. In part, understanding how power is organized and who may influence policy processes is critical to change. This reflective essay ends with tools and strategies for those wishing to engage governments in this shift. The proposed tools and strategies focus on how people (e.g. policy champions), processes (e.g. policy leverage points), and partnerships (e.g. ally­ship) generate ways in which advocates can, and do, engage governments in transformative change.

The politics of pro-outsider labour market reforms: a configurational study

AbstractOver the past decades, the level of regulation of fixed-term contracts has been in flux. Many reforms deregulating these contracts were followed by a regulatory countertrend, a puzzling finding considering influential theoretical expectations like the ones developed by the dualization and liberalization literatures. This paper draws on the comparative employment relations and comparative political economy literatures to identify the drivers of pro-outsider reforms. Furthermore, it develops an innovative argument claiming that governments may rely on support from a ‘domestic coalition’ including workers in permanent contracts, or they can leverage the European link to support their intention of conducting a pro-outsider reform. Each of these paths relies on the assemblage of distinct pro-reform coalitions of policy actors. To test our argument, the paper uses fsQCA. We compare 38 reforms enacted in 16 European countries between 1985–2019. After the fsQCA analysis, we conduct a qualitative discussion of the different paths.

Convergence in action: framing the climate crisis at the 2021 Pre-COP counter-summit in Milan

ABSTRACT With the emergence of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, youth climate activism has attracted increasing attention. Climate strikes are part of a long trajectory of mobilizations for climate justice, rooted in global justice and environmental struggles. Although research on social movements has analyzed differences and continuities within these, there have been few systematic comparisons between youth climate strikes and ‘traditional’ climate justice marches. Our paper contributes to fill this gap. We focus on the framing of climate change in two different protest actions that took place in Milan, Italy, during the Pre-COP26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2021: a climate strike by Fridays for Future, and a ‘traditional’ climate justice march by a wide coalition of actors. Relying on protest surveys and qualitative interviews, we discuss differences, similarities, and spaces for convergence among activists in these different fora, focusing on the framing of climate change, and on the meanings attached to ‘system change’.

Risk ambassadors and saviours: Children and futuring public health interventions.

Schools are increasingly positioned as sites for intervening on the bodies and minds of children in the here and now in order to bring about health gain for the future. Public health interventions for schools bring together coalitions of commercial, statutory and philanthropic actors with children and their teachers and carers. Drawing on ethnographic case studies in London, UK, this paper explores two such interventions: one aiming to increase levels of physical activity and one to reduce exposure to air pollution. Both interventions not only evoke care for children's own current and future wellbeing but also fold in imaginaries of collective health futures, which orient and legitimise particular intervention logics and actions. As interventions unfold, children are recruited as monitors of health risks in the present. They are also positioned as risk ambassadors, who will leverage care about unhealthy environments and lifestyles across space, to risky domestic environments, and into imagined health futures. These 'futuring' school-based interventions open up small alternative spaces in which imaginaries of collective and resistant public health practices emerge. However, in the here and now, children appear to be bearing a disproportionate burden of responsibility, as ambassadors for, and imagined saviours of, public and environmental health.

Contested nuclear discourses during the 2022 French presidential campaign

ABSTRACT The debate on nuclear energy in France offers insights into how energy, the environment, the economy, and society intersect. These insights are crucial to understand the future of sustainable energy. In this paper, the French nuclear debate as it emerged on Twitter during the Presidential campaign of 2021–2022 is analysed through a two-step discursive approach. Discourse Network Analysis is used to create a snapshot of the debate in terms of coalitions of actors and discourses; then, an interpretive approach is employed to analyse the meanings attached to the sets of policy positions obtained through DNA. The article shows who are the main actors and the most common arguments. Furthermore, it shows that, in France, pursuing the use of civil nuclear is framed as a pragmatic choice in the face of climate change and insecure energy supplies; in populist terms as a form of energy that could turn back the clock of globalisation; and as an impasse that prevents France from embracing a truly sustainable energy agenda. By unveiling this set of discourses, the article challenges the idea of ‘French nuclear exceptionalism’ often found in the literature and the media and contributes to the larger literature on nuclear discourses.

Free Milieus, Creative People: An Investigation of Creative City Policy in Istanbul from the Perspective of Governmentality

This paper analyzes the creative city policy for Istanbul, which has recently become a popular throughout the world. Cities are expected to be creative milieus that foster free circulation of people, ideas, and interactions for economic growth, global competitiveness, and social development. Drawing on Foucault and governmentality studies, this paper first argues that the creative city policy is a neoliberal political rationality that seeks to stimulate individuals' creative capacities through structuring urban space. Neoliberalism includes the de-governmentalization of state and the active participation of non-state actors in the governing processes. Second, using examples from street gentrification, industrial heritage re-functioning, and co-working spaces in Istanbul, this paper dissects how creativity, freedom, and economic growth intersect in urban space and how a broad coalition of political parties, state agencies, local authorities, non-governmental organizations, small-scale cultural entrepreneurs, and creative professionals have been formed around the creative city. As a result, creative city policy is a form of governmentality that includes official documents as well as spatial strategies of a heterogeneous coalition of state and non-state actors.

Terrestrial territories: From the Globe to Gaia, a new ground for territory

Territory is a central tool for analysing the politics, primarily between nation-states, of the division of a world based on the figure of the Globe. However, with the Anthropocene, the ground of territories has somehow changed, shifting from ‘the Globe’ of the globalisation age, to the Anthropocene, where Gaia, or the earth-system, ‘irrupts’ onto the political scene. Yet, both sovereign territories and critical approaches to territoriality, despite revealing the role of non-human actors in territorial interactions, fail to take into account the issue of the habitability of the Earth. This article advances the notion of ‘terrestrial territories’ as a new descriptive and analytical tool for a Gaia-politics intended to transcend traditional geopolitics by taking into account the dynamics of the planet. Resulting from the original intersection between critical territory studies and the late work of Bruno Latour, it introduces terrestrial territories as an original and much-needed notion that could help to describe new coalitions of actors along new lines of divisions and conflicts based on the logic of Gaia. Beyond the famous but inefficient ‘think global, act local’ scheme, the notion of terrestrial territory tries to reconcile the apparent hyperglobal nature of the planetary and the obviously local nature of action.

Early engagement and co-benefits strengthen cities’ climate commitments

Cities can lead the way in tackling climate change through robust climate actions (that is, measures taken to limit climate change or its impacts). However, escalating crises due to pandemics, conflict and climate change pose challenges to ambitious and sustained city climate action. Here we use global data on 793 cities from the Carbon Disclosure Project 2021 platform to assess how the COVID-19 crisis has affected cities’ reported climate commitments and actions and the factors associated with these impacts. We find climate actions persist despite funding shortfalls; yet only 43% of cities have implemented green recovery interventions. Co-benefits of climate action (for example, health outcomes) and early engagement on sustainability issues (for example, via climate networks) are associated with sustained climate action and finance during COVID-19 and green recovery interventions. Cities should strengthen sustainability co-benefits and relationships with coalitions of actors to support durable climate commitments during crises.

The “Evil Spectators?”

Abstract This article rethinks the relationship between opium and empire in twentieth-century Asia. A rich scholarship focuses on the success of anti-opium activists, whose moral crusades gave birth to today’s global drug control regimes. By contrast, I center attention on the lesser-known pro-opium forces, demonstrating how “bad” actors, recognized now as apologists for a dangerous drug, were once essential stakeholders in imperial rule. This article traces the interconnected lives of actors that favored continuing the drug’s legal commerce across Southeast Asia: the merchants, bankers, agents of shipping firms, insurance agencies and warehousing companies as well as employees of colonial industries and governments that sustained opium supply chains from India to British Malaya and French Indochina into the 1930s. Hardly a coherent coalition of profit-seeking actors, these pro-opium forces represented situational allies with linked fates despite diverse opinions, fragmented interests, and ambivalent positions toward their own opium-entangled practices. Understanding their dispersed nature gives scholars reason to revisit the imperial origins of global drug control, while underscoring Southeast Asia’s importance for understanding global histories of drugs and international relations.

The challenges experts face during creeping crises: the curse of complacency

The policy literature has generally conceptualised crises as urgent public threats with clearly demarcated ‘focusing events’. Consequently, most studies have identified the main challenges faced by expert agencies involved in evidence-based policymaking as managing uncertainty, time pressure and communication. However, less focus has been devoted to analysing the concrete challenges faced by expert agencies during creeping crises. Creeping crises are characterised by spatial and temporal fragmentation and elusiveness, which create an additional challenge for expert agencies: placing the crises on the political agenda. Comparing two global creeping crises: climate change (CC) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), this article highlights two distinct strategies for influencing policymaking. The analysis shows how two expert agencies, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), pursue different strategies when setting the global agenda and influencing policymaking. The findings show that the WHO’s approach to policymaking regarding AMR has been mostly guided by top-down, science-led, formal engagements and strategies. This approach has successfully increased the salience of the global challenge of AMR, providing strong, evidence-based solutions, but it has been less successful in promoting the challenge onto the global political agenda. In contrast, the UNFCCC’s approach to policymaking has relied more on horizontal, bottom-up, multidisciplinary, informal strategies. This approach has enabled a broader coalition of advocacy actors and placed CC persistently on the global political agenda. In this way, the article enhances our understanding of the role experts play in drawing attention to creeping crises.

Gender, Sex and Freedom: Testing the Theoretical Limits of the Twenty-First-Century ‘Gender Wars’ with Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray

Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides.

To play or not to play the ‘moral hazard card’: Germany and the European Union’s response to the Covid-19 crisis

ABSTRACT Avoiding moral hazard is a recurrent argument of those seeking to limit the development of European financial support mechanisms. Germany has been the traditional leader of this coalition of actors in the European Union (EU). However, in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, Germany supported an EU response which included grants and massive debt issuance. What was previously presented as unacceptable – because of moral hazard – became appropriate. This contribution seeks to explain why the German government ceased to emphasise the moral hazard problem in EU economic governance. We argue that the answer is not because of a challenge to the relevance of moral hazard per se, or because the Germans lost interest in the moral hazard problem, but rather because German policymakers were discursively constrained by one of the dominant meanings of moral hazard they had previously imposed – which lost its relevance in the context of a symmetric exogenous shock.

The co-creation of value by public and private actors in the front end of urban development projects

This study focuses on the co-creation of value in the front end of urban development projects (UDPs) established by coalitions of public and private actors to develop specific urban premises or areas. Creating value in UDPs calls for collaboration between municipal actors and private companies, specifically in the front end phase, during which major design decisions are made. This qualitative case study builds on data collected through 27 semi-structured interviews in a middle-sized city in Finland. Our data analysis resulted in the categorisation of four value co-creation processes involving municipal actors and private companies, namely, zoning, exploring, procuring and negotiating. The study's results offer insights into how value co-creation can be facilitated in UDPs. This study contributes to recent value-creation literature by providing a novel understanding of each value co-creation process, its characteristics and its corresponding co-created values.