The Adaptive Venue Shopping Framework: How Emergent Groups Choose Environmental Policymaking Venues

Abstract

Scholars have succeeded in producing several explanations for why groups choose to pursue their policymaking goals in different venues. A synthetic framework that explains the choices these groups make is developed through two case studies describing a conflict over the environmental problem of agricultural field burning. Emergent, boundedly rational, groups with a mission to clear the air of the pollutants associated with field burning, are found to be choosing venues by strategically assessing the institutional context. The particular institutional context that matters involves three primary elements: the group's mix of resources, opponents' resource strengths, and the degree of venue accessibility. These initial choices allow groups to generate new resources, to learn about which strategies do and do not work, and to change venues on the basis of their new resources and what they have learned.

The Environmental Performance of Participatory and Collaborative Governance: A Framework of Causal Mechanisms

“…Conversely, where distrust prevails, participants may be viewed by their adversaries as more powerful than they actually are (see Leach & Sabatier, , on “devil‐shift”). Participant characteristics : Participants may be more or less prone to co‐optation and devil‐shift. This likely depends on actors' political, legal, and technical resources (Ley & Weber, ). Stakeholders will decide strategically whether to participate and focus their skills and resources in a given process, or to pursue their interests in alternative venues with greater perceived benefits (Lubell, ; Sabatier & Jenkins‐Smith, ).…”

Vested Interests, Venue Shopping, and Policy Stability: The Long Road to Improving Air Quality in Oregon's Willamette Valley

“…How do they make these choices? Previous research advances a theory of “easy choices” (Ley & Weber, ). While not all choices are easy, choices typically fall somewhere between the theoretical extremes of an “easy best choice” and an “easy worst choice.” This case study finds empirical support that, as an emergent group, the Oregon Seed Council was guided into venues on the basis of its relative resource strengths, its support from a newly elected governor sympathetic to the growing community, and the increasingly accessible nature of the legislature that supported the economic framing advanced by growers.…”

“…The AVS Framework places its primary emphasis on the institutional context as a critical factor that shapes the decision calculus of these boundedly rational groups as they are choosing venues. This institutional context involves a) a group's level of political, technical, or legal resources for approaching certain venues; b) whether a group's opponent possesses superior resources and dominates in certain venues; and c) whether venues are receptive to the group's preferred framing of the issue or conflict (see Ley & Weber, ). To the AVS Framework institutional context matters a great deal, but this institutional milieu tells only part of the story because another fundamental assumption of this theory is that boundedly rational groups are capable of adaptive learning during the course of long‐term policy processes (Sabatier & Jenkins‐Smith, ).…”

“…There is no shortage of recent scholarship that examines the strategies of groups as they are choosing venues for pursuing their policy goals (e.g., Buffardi, Pekkanen, & Smith, ; Ley & Weber, , ). This article uses the first ever empirical case study of an environmental policy conflict in the Pacific Northwest, the problem of agricultural field burning in Oregon, to explore how an emergent, but later dominant, agricultural interest group chose among the various venues that were available to it.…”

Interest groups as multi-venue players

“…However, if groups do not realize their policy preferences in their preferred venue, they can still turn to other venues to seek redress. Such 'adaptive venue shoppers' (Ley and Weber 2015) learn that their preferred venue is indeed dominated by their opponents and expect the new venue to be more receptive to their policy preferences (Jones and Baumgartner 2005;Pralle 2006). This compensation hypothesis states that weak groups compensate for a lack of advocacy success in one venue by engaging in another venue (Beyers and Kerremans 2012).…”