Policy networks, stakeholder interactions and climate adaptation in the region of South East Queensland, Australia

Abstract

The strategic use of science in regional policymaking forums often assumes collaborative interactions between stakeholders. However, other types of stakeholder interactions are possible. This paper uses the ecology of games to frame an investigation into stakeholder participation in the policy networks for regional climate change planning for South East Queensland, Australia. We tracked organisational participation in policy forums between 2008 and 2012. We then used a novel bipartite network theoretical approach to identify participation by different types of organisations across shared multiple forums, which we argue prefaces: cooperation, collaboration, support or advocacy. Network analysis was then combined with semistructured interviews to access how scientific information was utilised across the regional network. Our results suggest that stakeholder interactions were predominately used to advocate for organisational agendas. Advocacy artificially narrows the scope of possible policy options and represents a biased, selective use of information. While advocacy is an important part of policy process, as a counter balance, explicit efforts are needed to recurrently expand the scope of policy options.

Policy forums: Why do they exist and what are they used for?

“…Including the political domain can be important for finding out what actions are likely to be adopted and funded, or how to achieve political awareness of an issue. The scientific or technical domain is important for informing actors on what actions will solve particular problems (Feldman and Khademian 2007), especially with respect to highly complex and uncertain policy issues (McAllister et al 2013).…”

Balancing collaboration with coordination: Contesting eradication in the Australian plant pest and disease biosecurity system

“…Over or under representation of certain configurations can then be used to infer the presence of important social and political processes (e.g. Bodin and Tengo 2012;Berardo 2014a;Lubell et al 2014;McAllister et al 2014;Guerrero et al 2015a,b;McAllister et al 2015a,b;Bodin et al 2016;Bodin et al in press). To statistically identify over or under representation of configurations we used an Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM), a statistical network methodology (Frank and Strauss 1986;Wasserman and Pattison 1996).…”

“…Recent studies explored the structural patterns of how stakeholders with different interests participate in environmental governance, with a view to identifying if those structures predispose, or result from, collaboration or coordination. Such conceptual approaches have been applied to collaborative water governance Berardo 2014a;Berardo and Lubell 2016), climate change planning (McAllister et al 2014), plant biosecurity , and regional-scale conservation (Guerrero et al 2015a,b). Following these studies, we conceptualise our network as a set of organisational stakeholders who are connected to each other indirectly via mutual participation in the set of committees and working groups (policy forums, see Fischer and Leifeld 2015) which organised the response and subsequent management programs.…”

Bringing it all together: researcher dialogue to improve synthesis in regional climate adaptation in South-East Queensland, Australia

“…It recognises the institutional, political and highly contextualised character of policy and planning where competition between multiple truth claims, made by different actors or interests, determines acceptable action (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003;Fischer 2003;Rydin 2003;Bulkeley 2010;Lovell et al 2009;McAllister et al 2013). The same dynamics, we argue, also hold for the diverse disciplinary and epistemological perspectives on adaptation that arise in sectoral-oriented programmes of research.…”

“…Functional interdependencies are present when actions, within a complex system of economic, social and environmental components, are linked through biophysical-geophysical relationships. Interdependencies in the politics of institutional design and management occur when different sectoral interests intentionally forge links between issues and institutions in order to pursue individual or collective goals (Young 2002;Young et al 1999;McAllister et al 2013). Functional interdependencies often give rise to political ones, where the motives of sectoral interests may be cooperative or competitive in character.…”