Branching Out, Digging In

Environmental Advocacy and Agenda Setting

Sarah B. Pralle

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781589012806
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sarah B. Pralle takes an in-depth look at why some environmental conflicts expand to attract a lot of attention and participation, while others generate little interest or action. Branching Out, Digging In examines the expansion and containment of political conflict around forest policies in the United States and Canada.

Late in 1993 citizens from around the world mobilized on behalf of saving old-growth forests in Clayoquot Sound. Yet, at the same time only a very few took note of an even larger reserve of public land at risk in northern California. Both cases, the Clayoquot Sound controversy in British Columbia and the Quincy Library Group case in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California, centered around conflicts between environmentalists seeking to preserve old-growth forests and timber companies fighting to preserve their logging privileges. Both marked important episodes in the history of forest politics in their respective countries but with dramatically different results. The Clayoquot Sound controversy spawned the largest civil disobedience in Canadian history; international demonstrations in Japan, England, Germany, Austria, and the United States; and the most significant changes in British Columbia's forest policy in decades. On the other hand, the California case, with four times as many acres at stake, became the poster child for the "collaborative conservation" approach, using stakeholder collaboration and negotiation to achieve a compromise that ultimately broke down and ended up in the courts.

Pralle analyzes how the various political actors—local and national environmental organizations, local residents, timber companies, and different levels of government—defined the issues in both words and images, created and reconfigured alliances, and drew in different governmental institutions to attempt to achieve their goals. She develops a dynamic new model of conflict management by advocacy groups that puts a premium on nimble timing, flexibility, targeting, and tactics to gain the advantage and shows that how political actors go about exploiting these opportunities and overcoming constraints is a critical part of the policy process.

1
The Expansion and Containment of Policy Conflict

When Congress started debating the Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery and Economic Stability Act in the spring of 1997, opposition to the legislation by members of the environmental community was palpable. Nevertheless, leaders in the fight against the QLG forest plan were frustrated: They had generally failed to attract the attention of the broader environmental movement, let alone a wider public. The media was taking scant notice of the issue, and the stories that did appear were largely sympathetic to the QLG and their forest management plan. National environmental organizations, for their part, were late to get involved in the conflict, allowing the QLG to set the terms of debate and recruit key allies to their cause. In short, the QLG coalition had restricted the scope of conflict around their policy proposal, managing the issue much more effectively than their opponents.¹

In British Columbia, on the other hand, environmental organizations wielded the upper hand in the conflict over forest management in the early to mid-1990s and were well on their way to expanding participation in it. Media attention to British Columbia’s forest practices was high and generally more favorable to the claims of environmentalists than the timber industry. Groups like Friends of Clayoquot Sound in alliance with Greenpeace International had successfully “internationalized” the conflict over logging in Clayoquot Sound, leaving the logging industry and the B.C. government scrambling to make their case to a global public. The forest advocacy community had, at least for a time, expanded the scope of the conflict, much to the dismay of their opponents.

Controlling the scope of conflict around an issue is a key strategy in politics, because the amount of attention, mobilization, and conflict surrounding a policy problem or proposal affects whether it gets on agendas and how it is resolved. A lack of change in agendas and policies is due in part to the ability of dominant policymakers and advocacy groups to restrict the scope of conflict around a policy issue. These actors may form a policy monopoly where they control both the image of a policy problem and access to the policy process (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). As long as conflict remains restricted in its scope, a small group of stakeholders can largely direct the policy process surrounding an issue. Dramatic policy change under these circumstances is rare unless initiated by a policy monopoly to further the interests of its stakeholders.²

Those seeking significant agenda and policy change often invite attention to and participation in a conflict in order to get movement on an issue that has languished in the backwaters of some decision room, has become stalemated by the “usual suspects,” or is simply not deemed important enough to warrant governmental attention. E. E. Schattschneider (1960) claims that disadvantaged, “outsider” groups try to expand the scope of conflict surrounding an issue so as to upset the balance of power in a policy subsystem. These individuals or groups may appeal directly to government, attempting to transform a “private” conflict into a public one, or involve a wider public in the debate in order to gain the attention of government officials. As the public becomes aware of a problem and demands action, decision makers face pressure to either break up the policy monopoly or circumvent it. Agenda, if not policy change, is often the result of these pressures.

In short, the emergence of an issue on the public and governmental agenda, as well as its resolution, depends in part on the degree of conflict surrounding a policy problem or proposal.³ Without conflict, problems will be ignored or addressed by a small group of experts or stakeholders; with conflict, problems are more likely to attract a broader range of participants, including segments of the general public. Put differently, policymaking around issues with and without “publics” will differ (May 1991).⁴ For this reason, advocacy groups interested in maintaining or changing the policy status quo will attempt to either restrict or expand the scope of conflict around an issue. While this general point is well understood by policy scholars, additional work needs to be done to clarify the meaning of conflict expansion and containment and to increase our understanding of how these processes work (Kollman 1998). In this chapter, I disaggregate the concepts of expansion and containment and suggest ways that advocacy groups and policymakers succeed at such strategies.

Strategies of Conflict Expansion and Containment: Issues, Actors, and Institutions

What is being expanded or contained when advocacy groups and policymakers attempt to control the scope of conflict around an issue?⁵ The policy literature offers several answers: The degree of expansion might refer to the salience of an issue, the intensity of the conflict, the number of participants involved, or how interest groups court the public and policymakers (Schattschneider 1960; Cobb and Elder 1972; Baumgartner 1989; Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Kollman 1998). These various understandings of conflict expansion and containment lead to confusion in the literature; it is not always clear what an author is referring to when she claims that a conflict has expanded.

To clarify what is being expanded and contained, I identify three main focal points around which strategies of expansion and containment revolve: issues, actors, and institutions. One important struggle is between groups who want to raise the importance, visibility, and “publicness” of a problem and those who want to decrease the political significance of an issue. This refers to the expansion and containment of policy issues. A second set of strategies is focused on policy actors; the key dynamic here revolves around expanding or containing participation in policy conflicts. Depending on their objectives, advocacy groups seek to either mobilize or demobilize various audiences to a conflict (Schattschneider 1960; Baumgartner 1989; Baumgartner and Jones 1993). The final set of strategies focuses on institutions, the rules of the game, and the venues in which policy conflicts take place. Advocacy groups seeking change try to advance a policy issue in a new venue or to change institutional rules, while status-quo groups attempt to preserve existing arrangements so as to prevent change (Baumgartner 1989; Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993, 1999; C. Wilson 2000).⁶ Each of these strategies is examined in detail in the following sections and summarized in table 1.1.

Issue Definition: Using Rhetoric and Symbols to Expand and Contain Conflicts

What makes some policy issues “big” and others “small”? Why are some issues discussed in fairly narrow terms, while others carry broad political implications? What determines the scope of an issue, or its political significance? Successful expansion of the scope of an issue is part strategy, part luck, and part art. Some issues seem predestined to be big—problems that affect large numbers of people, solutions that cost significant sums of public money, and policy changes that represent dramatic shifts from past practices (Baumgartner 1989). President Clinton’s effort to reform the U.S. health care system, for example, predictably attracted a great deal of public and media attention because it involved a rather large outlay of government funds and would potentially affect millions of Americans. Other issues are “hard” in that they are technically complex, require specialized knowledge, or are highly unfamiliar to the public (Pollack, Lilie, and Vittes 1993; Howlett and Ramesh 2002). These issues tend to attract less attention.

TABLE 1.1 Strategies of Conflict Expansion and Containment

But even these fairly straightforward claims hide many counterexamples. The bailing out of the savings and loan industry in the United States required enormous public subsidies, and yet the issue was apparently too complex and technically defined for it to figure prominently on the public agenda. And nuclear power, a technically complex issue, generated widespread opposition in the United States (Pollack, Lilie, and Vittes 1993; Ladd, Hood, and Van Liere 1983; Gamson and Modigliani 1989). In Baumgartner’s (1989) study of thirty educational policy debates in France, he found that the “objective” scope of the issue, measured in the above terms, had very little effect on whether the issue attracted widespread public attention or was decided by a small group of experts. Put simply, issues are malleable, and politically savvy actors are capable of containing a potentially big issue as well as expanding a seemingly small one. To do this, policy actors manipulate the symbols and rhetoric associated with a conflict. As Deborah Stone (1988, 25) remarks, “People fight with ideas as well as about them. The different sides in a conflict create different portrayals of the battle—who is affected, how they are affected, and what is at stake. Political fights are conducted with money, with rules, and with votes, to be sure, but they are conducted above all with words.” Strategies of issue expansion and containment involve rhetorical battles over the ideas and causal reasoning associated with a policy, fought in the realm of public opinion and media attention. The weapons are words, symbols, and images.

The battles over issue definition emerge when opponents cannot deny the existence of a problem. Faced with overwhelming evidence or public outcry, opponents to policy change will downplay the severity of a problem, define it in highly technical terms, or otherwise limit the discussion of a problem so as to decrease participation and public attention to an issue (Baumgartner 1989; Cobb and Ross 1997; Kingdon 1995). They are likely to face competing efforts by proponents of policy change to expand the terms of debate. Issue expansion efforts are aimed at enlarging the significance of a problem, broadening its political relevance, and otherwise raising the stakes by suggesting that a problem affects a great many people or implicates important values and belief systems.

Issue expansion and containment strategies are part of the larger battle over problem definition (Rochefort and Cobb 1994; Kingdon 1995). Beyond trying to expand or contain the significance of issues, advocacy groups attempt to shape the framing of policy issues more generally. In other words, advocacy groups are not only trying to increase or decrease attention to an issue but are also interpreting events and constructing them in such a way that makes sense to potential participants and decision makers. These frames offer evaluations of current policy and prescriptions for what should be done. Therefore, it is in the interest of advocacy groups to get their framing of a problem accepted by policymakers and the general public so that their solutions seem logical and desirable.⁷ For example, law enforcement officials frame the problem of police brutality (to the extent they admit to the problem at all) in individual terms—the policemen who brutalize suspects constitute a few “bad apples” in an otherwise law-abiding police force. This framing calls for little policy action beyond the possible reprimand or firing of individual cops. As long as an individualized frame is accepted, the lack of a broader policy addressing the problem of police brutality is justified (Lawrence 2000).

Of course, no single actor or set of actors has complete control over policy images and frames because they are partially shaped by exogenous factors, including history, individual experience, unanticipated focusing events, and the like. As noted by Rochefort and Cobb (1994, 7), the social construction of policy problems is an indeterminate process involving multiple players “who are constrained by shifts in the site of decision-making as well as accidents of history.” Other actors and institutions, such as the media, are also framing issues, asserting causal stories, and making connections among problems (see Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Schon and Rein 1994). As Lawrence (2000) notes in the case of police brutality, occasionally a news story about police use of force—the Rodney King case being the most obvious example—spins out of official control. In such cases, even the most adept actors have trouble managing an issue. In short, issue definition processes are complex and ever changing: “Conflict is inherently spontaneous and confusing, but activists and organized interests attempt to direct its course by strategic maneuvers based on problem definitions” (Rochefort and Cobb 1994, 5).

Proponents of change are either aided or hampered in their efforts to expand the scope of an issue by the structure of opportunities afforded in the political system. Institutions, in other words, shape the prospects for issue expansion, attesting to the interrelated nature of issues and institutions. In closed systems where there is no independent media, no democratic electoral system, and very little access to alternative policy venues, successful issue expansion is unlikely because of the lack of opportunities and arenas for groups to reframe dominant issue images (Baumgartner 1989; Howlett and Ramesh 2002). Sometimes, the rhetoric and images associated with a conflict assume a life of their own as particular problem definitions get lodged in the minds of the public and policymakers alike (see Yee 1996). At other times, a group might redefine an issue in just one venue or for only a brief time following a focusing event.⁸

The basic structure of government and political institutions thus impose the most general constraints and opportunities on groups who wish to expand an issue. But another set of opportunities and constraints operates in the more immediate political environment of policy actors. These include such things as the timing of elections, levels of media coverage of a conflict, unanticipated focusing events, and the political standing of the ruling administration (Baumgartner 1989; Birkland 1997; Kingdon 1995). Whether these opportunities are realized depends in part on the resources of problem proponents, including their entrepreneurial skills, political experience, financial assets, relationships with allies, and their tactical resourcefulness. The following sections highlight three key tactics for expanding an issue—issue linkage, boundary construction, and problem ownership.

Creating Links to Other Issues. One way to contain a problem is to treat it in isolation, denying its connection to other matters of importance. Murray Edelman (1993, 236) suggests that “the treatment of closely connected issues as though they were autonomous” serves the interests of powerful actors. Policymakers may disassociate a policy from related issues or overarching governing ideologies to decontextualize undesirable policy outcomes or government actions. They can deny that the problem was predictable given the government’s approach to resolving (or not resolving) policy conflicts. Moreover, policymakers can assume a piecemeal approach to addressing problems rather than consider broad political or economic restructuring based on a holistic understanding of an issue (Edelman 1993, 236). Treating policies in isolation restricts conflict by narrowing the discourse that is used in discussing problems and solutions, by limiting the perceived importance of an issue, and by discouraging involvement of actors who might not see their relationship to the issue in question.

Conversely, groups can expand conflicts by linking them to other public problems and important political debates (Riker 1986; see also Haas 1980). When the public and policymakers connect a previously isolated problem to a broader issue, its significance increases. For example, the gravity of floods and other extreme weather-related disasters grows when they are linked to the larger problem of climate change. The association of climate change—a human-caused problem—to floods suggests that floods are not merely accidents, or acts of God. If human activities are indirectly responsible for the extreme weather patterns, then the public significance of the problem increases simply because we can do something about it.⁹ Problems or issues that are linked together raise the importance of each problem simultaneously. Using the same example, the public’s perception that climate change is an important issue increases to the extent that it is linked to real, physical events on the ground. The floods, hurricanes, hot weather, and other alleged effects of climate change make the issue more visible and real to the public, thus increasing its scope and significance.

Political actors realize that linking their issue to others can be strategically useful. For one thing, the addition of new issues means new constituents, thus bolstering claims that the original problem affects large numbers of people. Policymakers and problem proponents may find that linking problems allows them to speak of a generalized threat or public crisis, providing a better justification for policy action. Donovan (2001) shows, for example, how lawmakers linked the problem of drugs to crime, thereby raising the salience of drug use to the level of a national crisis even though drug use was declining in terms of raw numbers. Linking issues might also facilitate strategic alliances among groups whose issues are connected to one another. Tarry (2001) provides an example from the U.S. aviation industry that was successful in linking its concerns about tort reform to the concerns of the pilot community. According to Tarry (2001, 584), the pilot’s organization provided “significant organizational resources the industry lacked,” thereby securing a victory for the aviation industry when the issue of tort reform came before Congress.

Issues also carry with them a set of symbols, metaphors, and images that can be used in the rhetorical battles between problem proponents and opponents. It is far easier to use preexisting symbols and images, ones that have already proved to be culturally resonant, than to fashion them anew. As Gamson (1992, 134) notes, “Issue frames gain plausibility and seem more natural to the extent that they resonate with enduring themes that transcend specific issue domains” (see also Gamson and Modigliani 1989). New issues can also inject new ideas into a debate by suggesting particular causal stories that assign blame, imply consequences, and suggest solutions. These causal stories are implicitly invoked when issues are connected to one another, allowing problem proponents to transfer existing judgments to a new problem with relatively little expenditure of scarce resources. For example, by linking drug use to crime, policymakers can more easily justify a law enforcement approach to drug offenders, advocating for jail time rather than for rehabilitative programs.

Finally, if problem proponents are able to connect their issue to deep cleavages or ideological debates in politics, then the stakes of the issue increase as the battle takes on added significance. The success of antinuclear activists, for example, hinged on their ability to link the issue of nuclear power to core economic values that divide the public (Pollack, Lilie, and Vittes 1993). Linking an issue to controversial or polarized debates is key. Indeed, advocacy groups who want to defuse an issue will likely link it to noncontroversial issues, thereby decreasing conflict overall and providing a basis for consensus. Given this, we can expect that battles will ensue over what issue linkages (if any) are the most appropriate and what are the nature of those linkages, as various players recognize strategic advantages and disadvantages in associating their issue with others.

Constructing Boundaries. Advocacy groups can manipulate policy images by redrawing the boundaries around policy issues and problems. Issue boundaries refer to the formal and informal lines that designate where a problem ends, how far it reaches, and who has jurisdiction over it. The boundaries around some issues appear to be objective—water travels, therefore water pollution transcends local and state boundaries. All nations share one atmosphere; therefore climate change is a global problem requiring international cooperation. The nature of an environmental problem, in other words, would seem to influence its categorization and the boundaries we draw around it. But issues are subject to manipulation and recategorization. Strategic actors can convincingly argue that a problem, once understood as a “local” issue, is really a national or global one. Less frequent but just as important are cases in which a problem that was once broadly understood is recategorized as a local or regional issue. The boundaries we draw around issues are just as much a construction of our collective understandings as they are “real” in the sense that they accurately represent the real range or reach of a problem.

The ability to categorize environmental problems is especially difficult. Such flexibility i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The Expansion and Containment of Policy Conflict
• Part I: The Expansion of Conflict in British Columbia Forest
• Part II: The Containment of Conflict in Northern
• Appendix: Sample Interview Questions
• Notes
• References
• Index