Mechanisms for policy (dis)integration: explaining food policy and climate change adaptation policy in the Netherlands

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 mechanismbased 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.

Beyond conceptual understanding of barriers to national adaptation policy: A comparative analysis of South Korea and the UK

“…An empirical understanding of social mechanisms has been emphasised to understand the nature of causality and explain connections between causes and effects (Hedström and Swedberg, 1998;Gerring 2008;Mason et al 2013). The understanding of mechanisms is important to open up the 'black boxes' of barriers and to practically use the results of research on barriers in real adaptation processes (Wellstead et al, 2018;Biesbroek and Candel, 2019). It is possible for researchers and practitioners to collect diagnostic evidence, theorise variables and empirical examples, and test hypotheses (Kay and Baker, 2015;Wellstead et al, 2018).…”

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