Journal
CRITICAL POLICY STUDIES
Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 361-390Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2011.628002
Keywords
forest policy; land use policy; climate policy; argumentative discourse analysis; advocacy coalition framework; sustainability
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Funding
- German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU)
- forest biodiversity and climate change policy through Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN)
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In this article, we introduce an empirical case study of the German forest policy subsystem in order to understand how the concept of sustainable forest management has been discursively constructed, challenged, and changed over time. As a theoretical basis, we use an idea-based coalition approach, drawing on both the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Hajer's Argumentative Discourse Analysis. We show that rival coalitions that share a certain idea of forest management have dominated German forest policy for decades by employing different rhetorical and institutional strategies in order to incorporate their ideas into public policy institutions. Analyzing how the issue of climate change is discursively 'digested' by the actor coalitions, we find that climate change has been incorporated into the political argumentation of both coalitions in a manner consistent with their existing main policy ideas. Moreover, the membership of the coalitions has remained stable. These findings allow for conclusions regarding both our theoretical approaches and the policy subsystem's ability to adapt forests to cope with climate change.
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