Policy change and National Forest Programs: a Swiss experience of coalitions, external and internal events

ABSTRACT

This article aims to understand policy change by analyzing the external and internal events as well as actor resources, actor beliefs and coalitions. Empirically, we have selected the Swiss forest policy system and analyze two consecutive Swiss National Forest Programs and the related revision process of the forest law between 2004 and 2016. Exploring pathways of change according to the Advocacy Coalition Framework, we find that increased actor resources in the form of expertise, finances and political recognition alongside external and internal events – made the forest issue more salient – contribute to a successful policy change. These factors led to an altered actor coalition structure with less clear-cut positions and the shared recognition that change was necessary. The results show how Forest Policy Programs may increase their chances of producing policy change over time, as the first program failed to lead to policy change, while the second was successful.

KEYWORDS:

• Advocacy Coalition Framework
• Policy change
• National Forest Program
• Forest policy

Acknowledgements

We thank all interview participants for their essential contribution to the study. Parts of the research received funding under the FOEN project “Evaluation of the Swiss Forest Policy 2020”. We additionally would like to thank the FOEN and Tobias Schulz for providing the consultation statements and especially Thomas Abt for his support in organizing the documents. Finally, we would like to thank all participants of the Forest Policy Meeting in Vienna 2019, Leonard Creutzburg and two anonymous reviewers for their fruitful comments on how to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).