Why Government, Interest Groups, and Research Coordinate: The Different Purposes of Forums

Abstract

Forums are organizations that facilitate coordination among actors from different societal sectors such as government, interest groups, and research. Forums can serve various purposes that we represent on two dimensions. The first dimension, sector orientation, assesses the degree to which a forum serves the needs of a specific societal sector. The second dimension, advocacy orientation, refers to the extent to which a forum is oriented toward advocating the shared interests of its members. The empirical application to a set of 36 forums in Swiss habitat and land use policy shows that both orientations capture important differences between forums. An improved understanding of these differences contributes to answering some key questions of forum research, such as those related to forum outputs, the role of forums in governance systems, or actors’ incentives of forum participation.

Keywords:

• Advocacy orientation
• environmental governance
• forums
• sector orientation
• Switzerland
• typology

Acknowledgements

We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments which allowed us to improve the article substantially.

Notes

1 Note that the goal of this article is not a systematic literature review. However, it considers several existing theoretical frameworks which are based on systematic literature reviews (Bryson et al. 2006; Thomson and Perry 2006; Ansell and Gash 2007; Hardy 2010; Sørensen and Torfing 2011; Emerson et al. 2012; Fischer and Leifeld 2015).

2 There are several possible alternatives to the label “interest group sector.” In the science-policy interface literature “practice” has a similar meaning as interest group sector, however, the distinction between the government and the practice sector is vague. Another option would be “private sector,” however, this term tends to exclude public interest groups according to established understandings of the term. Finally, the term “stakeholder sector” could be considered. However, stakeholders arguably comprise research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).