by Tara Pozzi, Elise Zufall, Kyra Gmoser-Daskalakis, & Francesca Vantaggiato
The biggest environmental policy challenges of our time cut across policy sectors and levels of governance. The wide scope of these issues requires collaboration across sectoral, geographical, and administrative boundaries. Recent literature utilizing the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has explored the behavior of nascent subsystems, which emerge in response to novel policy challenges and feature developing coalitions.
However, we still lack an empirical approach to identify and analyze the structural characteristics of these nascent (i.e., emergent) subsystems and assess their implications for theoretical and subsystem development. How do we recognize a nascent policy subsystem when we see one, and what are the drivers of its coalitional structure?
This study builds and expands upon Ingold et al.’s (2017) study of nascent fracking policy subsystems in the United Kingdom and Switzerland, which found that network structure was better explained by actors’ secondary policy beliefs and former collaborative relationships than by actors’ deep core beliefs. We examine the case of the governance of sea-level rise (SLR) adaptation in the San Francisco Bay Area (SF Bay Area), utilizing a 2018 online survey to identify whether its governance system is nascent, whether actors’ policy core beliefs (specific to the subsystem) form discernible advocacy coalitions, and whether those beliefs inform network partner selection.
Employing community detection methods and a Bayesian model for statistical analysis of networks (the Bayesian Exponential Random Graph Model, or BERGM) to test for core policy belief homophily between actors, we found that the network does not divide into fully fledged coalitions (illustrated in Figure 1), and that belief homophily is a driver of network structure (Figure 2), suggesting that coalitions are emerging. Moreover, we determined that emerging coalitions dovetail existing policy divides in the SF Bay Area around environmental protection and environmental justice goals.
Taken together, these results suggest that coalition formation in the nascent subsystem of SLR in the SF Bay Area is associated with actors’ beliefs imported from pre-existing, related subsystems. At present, communities do not display the adversarial coalitional structure consistent with mature subsystems; instead, overlapping membership by actors in communities creates a core-periphery structure consistent with a collaborative policy subsystem.
Our analysis has important implications for theory, methods, and practice. It shows that nascent subsystems addressing new collective action problems such as SLR derive at least part of their emerging structure from existing coalitions. However, most policy actors in our network display heterogeneous policy core beliefs which do not clearly refer to either pre-existing environmental protection or environmental justice coalitions. This underscores the role that learning plays in coalition formation, particularly when actors face new issues and need to gather information to form their positions. Thus, while pre-existing coalitions shape collaborative ties in the current network structure, they need not prevent the development of entirely new coalitions in the future. Additionally, our empirical approach for recognizing a nascent policy subsystem, parsing out its structural characteristics, and understanding the drivers of its structure can be replicated in other emerging policy subsystem studies.
The implications of this analysis for practice are twofold: for one, understanding the structure of nascent policy subsystems can alert policymakers to the likely trade-offs to be faced in decision-making; and secondly, tracking subsystem development can ensure policymakers include affected interests in the governance process.
You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at
Pozzi, Tara, Elise Zufall, Kyra Gmoser-Daskalakis and Francesca Vantaggiato. 2024. “ Nascent Policy Subsystems in Polycentric Governance Networks: The Case of Sea-level Rise Governance in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Policy Studies Journal 52 (3): 561–581. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12549.
About the Authors
Tara Pozzi is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Group in Ecology at the University of California, Davis and a Delta Science Fellow. Her research focuses on how governance networks influence effective climate adaptation policy and planning decision-making. Prior to UC Davis, she completed her M.S. in Human-Environment Systems from Boise State University and her B.S. in Civil Engineering from Santa Clara University.
Website: https://tarapozzi.github.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tara-pozzi-74587856/
Elise Zufall is a PhD candidate in the Geography Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis. Zufall studies the role of actor relationships, beliefs, and knowledge in environmental resource management and decision-making. Zufall received her M.S. and B.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University.
Kyra Gmoser-Daskalakis is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Group in Ecology at the University of California, Davis. She studies collaborative environmental governance, with a particular focus on the implementation of multi-benefit green infrastructure. She holds a B.S. in Environmental Economics and Policy from UC Berkeley and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyra-gmoser-daskalakis-939375b3
X (Twitter): @kyraskyegd
Francesca Pia Vantaggiato is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London (UK). Her research focuses on how policy-makers and stakeholders use collaborative relationships to tackle change and uncertainty. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Policy Studies Journal and Global Environmental Change. Prior to King’s College London, Vantaggiato was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Science & Policy at the University of California, Davis.
Website: https://francescavantaggiato.github.io/
Bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fpvantaggiato.bsky.social
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