Month: January 2024

Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance

by Elizabeth A. Koebele & Deserai Anderson Crow

Conflict is a natural part of democratic processes. However, understanding what drives conflict – and how it can be mitigated to a level where negotiation can occur – is essential for fostering productive policy making.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) argues that policy conflict is fundamentally driven by belief divergence among coalitions, or groups of policy actors who share beliefs about a policy subsystem and coordinate to achieve their goals. It makes sense, then, that bringing coalitions’ beliefs closer together may also reduce conflict. However, the ACF warns that beliefs are hard to change, especially in high-conflict settings where actors are prone to biased assimilation of information, the devil-shift, and other tendencies that exacerbate conflict.

Collaborative governance is touted as a way to reduce policy conflict under such circumstances by encouraging diverse policy actors to engage in sustained, consensus-oriented deliberation around a shared problem. While collaborative governance may foster some level of belief convergence through information sharing and collective learning, it may also encourage opposing coalitions to negotiate through other mechanisms. For example, as they participate in a collaborative process, coalitions may come to better understand one another’s needs over time, build trust and mutual respect, and support collaborative institutions they perceive to be fair, even as they maintain unique beliefs.

To better understand the relationship between beliefs, conflict, and negotiation, we empirically analyze how two adversarial coalitions’ beliefs changed as they participated in a collaborative water governance process in Colorado, U.S., over the course of a decade. While the collaborative process ended in negotiated agreement, our analyses of longitudinal survey and interview data show that the coalitions’ beliefs actually diverged more at the end of the process than they did at the start – a finding contrary to what we would expect if negotiation was driven primarily by belief convergence.

We then identify several other aspects of the collaborative process and broader policy context that facilitated negotiation among the coalitions. Most importantly, societal value shifts, process norms that institutionalized actor roles and encouraged “multi-purpose” solutions, and the development of respect and social capital among actors appear to have promoted successful negotiation amidst belief divergence. We also found that the trend toward greater belief divergence was primarily attributed to one coalition strengthening their own unique beliefs over time while the other coalition’s beliefs remained fairly stable throughout the process.

Our results demonstrate that while belief divergence was likely a driver of conflict in this policy process, collaborative governance helped adversarial policy actors identify places where they could agree on, or at least consent to, common solutions over time. These findings have important implications for how collaborative processes can be designed to mitigate conflict among opposing coalitions and encourage future research on who changes their beliefs, how, and why while participating in a collaborative process. Scholars should also examine how collaborative governance affects different policy beliefs in different ways, which can help support the development of a more robust typology of beliefs in the ACF literature.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Koebele, Elizabeth A., and Deserai A., Crow. 2023. “ Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance.” Policy Studies Journal, 51, 439–458. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12496.

About the Authors

Elizabeth A. Koebele, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and B.A.s in English and Education from Arizona State University. Dr. Koebele researches and teaches about water policy and management in the western United States, with a focus on understanding the impacts of collaborative policy-making processes on governance and environmental outcomes in the Colorado River Basin. She also co-edits the scholarly journal Policy & Politics.

Dr. Deserai Anderson Crow is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. Her work focuses on environmental policy as well as crisis and disaster recovery, risk mitigation in local communities, and stakeholder involvement in decision-making processes. She earned her PhD from Duke University, and her B.S. and MPA from the University of Colorado.

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Policy Stability and Policy Change in China: A Systematic Literature Review of the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

by Annemieke van den Dool & Jialin Cammie Li

To what extent do government policies in China change over time? Measuring the magnitude and frequency of policy change is an important step in understanding the driving forces of policymaking in China, which we know surprisingly little about despite the country’s large population and growing role in global governance. To answer this question, we turned to the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, which holds that government policies tend to be stable over time with occasional major change.

Although the PET’s explanatory power is considered to be universal, most English-language studies test the theory in democracies. In late 2021, we found only eight English-language peer-reviewed journal articles that apply the PET to China. These pioneering studies demonstrate the punctuated equilibrium pattern in policymaking in China, yet many questions remain unanswered, especially regarding policy change across different policy issues and venues, the frequency of large policy change, and information processing.

Remarkably, however, the Chinese-language PET literature on mainland China is much larger, albeit fragmented. We decided to conduct a systematic literature review to synthesize existing findings and identify research priorities, before we purposively design new studies. This is important given the effort and time required to conduct PET studies, which is exacerbated by limited data transparency and availability in China.

Through CNKI – China’s largest academic research database – we found 88 China-focused PET journal articles, which we analyzed in terms of methodology, operationalization, and patterns of policy change. We found that Chinese-language PET research is increasing. Moreover, contrary to the English-language PET literature, most Chinese studies are qualitative. Like in the English-language PET literature, weak operationalization of the PET core concepts is common.

One important takeaway from our systematic review is the consensus that government policymaking in China follows a punctuated equilibrium pattern with long periods of stability alternated with bursts of major policy change.

However, contrary to our expectations, our dataset contains only limited evidence in support of the hypothesis that government budgetary change in autocracies is more intensified compared to democracies, i.e., less frequent but larger budgetary adjustments. This hypothesis was first proposed by Chan and Zhao’s (2016) pioneering study on budget change in China. They and others have argued that state control over information flows inhibits the capacity of policymakers in autocracies to respond to problems in a timely and proportional manner because they miss out on important problem signals.

However, our analysis shows that there are very few studies that have tested this hypothesis in a systematic way. Moreover, we observed methodological variation in existing China-focused PET literature, which is illustrated in the table below. In our dataset, only one article (Li et al., 2019) is similar to Chan and Zhao (2016) in terms of methods and findings. All other studies are either qualitative in nature or differ in terms of period, scope (i.e., including only selected policy areas rather than the entire budget), data, and calculation methods. This makes it difficult to compare existing research findings.


Table 1. Regional-level punctuated equilibrium theory budget studies on China (Chinese and English)

To better understand policymaking in China and how it differs from other countries, we advocate for more quantitative PET studies on China that are broad in scope (rather than focusing on selected policy areas), cover a long period of time, and use the exact same methods as existing studies on democracies.A study that does this is Qin & Huang’s (2023) impressive analysis of national-level agenda diversity in China, which is methodologically similar to existing studies in democracies. In this study, the authors manually coded 40 years of State Council Gazettes and found a higher intensity of punctuations in China compared to democracies. We look forward to more such long-term studies across different policy venues.

References

Chan, K. N., & Zhao, S. (2016). Punctuated Equilibrium and the Information Disadvantage of Authoritarianism: Evidence from the People’s Republic of China. Policy Studies Journal, 44(2), 134-155.

Qin, X., & Huang, J. (2023). Policy punctuations and agenda diversity in China: a national level analysis from 1980 to 2019. Policy Studies, 1-21.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal

van den Dool, A., & Li, J. (2023). What do we know about the punctuated equilibrium theory in China? A systematic review and research priorities. Policy Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12502

About the Authors

Annemieke van den Dool is an assistant professor in the Social Sciences Division at Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu, China. Her research focuses on policymaking, policy process theories, and crisis management in China, especially in the areas of health and the environment. Learn more about her research at: http://www.annemiekevandendool.com.

Follow her on X @PubPolicyChina or on BlueSky @avandendool.bsky.social.

Jialin Li is an undergraduate student at Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu, China. Li majors in Political Economy with a minor in Public Policy. Her research focuses on policy process theories and policy change in China.

Follow her on X @li_cammie or on BlueSky @cammieli.bsky.social.

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Analyzing the Association of Policy Narratives with Problem Tractability in the Implementation of EU Decisions: Evidence from the Phytosanitary Policy Area

by Marco Schito 

Stories can help us make sense of this world by building compelling narratives in which the motives of and interactions between heroes, victims, and villains weave a plot, resulting in the resolution of the problem. However, a growing number of policy issues are becoming “intractable” in the sense that there is no easy way to address and solve the problem.

In this study, I employ the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to understand how the stories recounted during a mysterious epidemic decimating the population of olive trees in South-Eastern Italy were associated with the tractability of this policy problem. I analyze 79 editorials, opinion pieces, and guest columns published between 2014 and 2020 from five local and national news outlets across the political spectrum.

The study focuses on the debate surrounding the implementation of EU decisions aimed at tackling this epidemic. EU implementing decisions are normally a very drab and straightforward affair that should leave little space for competing narratives to take root. Nevertheless, several competing narratives did emerge about the causes of the problem, the best practices of implementation, and even the policy solution. Theories of policy implementation offer a theoretical hook to the NPF to address the association between narratives and tractability by suggesting that problems may become more tractable if a theory about the causes of the problem the implementing policy is addressing is developed.

In the study, I first test whether narratives that attribute different roles to characters and emphasize disagreements about the causes and solutions of the problem are suggestive of a higher degree of problem intractability. Secondly, I test whether the accumulation of scientific knowledge to generate a valid causal theory linking problems, means and solutions is associated with changes in the usage of narrative strategies.

The strongest differences in the use of characters were found for heroes, especially between the most ideologically opposed news outlets. Moreover, the analyzed documents differed in the way they weaved their plots, presented differing solutions, and made appeals to science to solve the problem. All but one news outlets also displayed a stronger use of blame-apportionment strategies (the so-called “devil shift”) as opposed to highlighting problem-fixers. Hence, these narrative elements created a vicious cycle of polarisation based on disagreements about the facts and theories and on the way forward, contributing to making this policy problem all the less tractable. 

To assess whether the tractability of the problem changed over time thanks to the presence of established theories about the causes of the epidemic, I took a temporal approach to the devil shift. While scientists did manage to establish the causes of the epidemic in May 2017, Figure 1 shows that the news outlets continued to employ blame-apportionment strategies throughout the entire period of analysis. 

From a substantive standpoint, the results of this study cast doubt on the ability of policy actors to engage in fruitful debates in an increasingly polarised world. Theoretically, however, the article represents a first attempt to bring the NPF together with the literature on problem definition and implementation. The three partly share a common language, and insights from each can add to the others’ theoretical and empirical developments.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Schito, Marco. 2023. Analyzing the association of policy narratives with problem tractability in the implementation of EU decisions: Evidence from the phytosanitary policy area. Policy Studies Journal, 51, 869–886. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12500

About the Author

Marco Schito is a researcher at the Public Policy and Management Institute (PPMI) in Vilnius, Lithuania. His research interests involve socio-economic issues and state-business relations. He was most recently involved in studies about the effect of inflation on small and medium enterprises in the EU-27.
E-mail: marco.schito@ppmi.lt

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