Policy Network

Policy networks comprise international and national governmental and nongovernmental interconnected actors in a given policy space. The climate change policy network, for example, would include United Nations (UN) agencies, government departments of the environment, Greenpeace, Al Gore (founder and current chair of the Alliance for Climate Protection), and David Suzuki (Japanese Canadian academic, science broadcaster, environmental activist, and founder of David Suzuki Foundation). Network members need not agree with each other. They share a common language and a set of reference points and so can argue or disagree within a consensual frame of discourse.

The backdrop to the origins of network analyses is a concern with understanding the relationship between state and society and, in particular, the organization of interests in society. The early postwar history of political science and public policy wrestled with the best way to theorize the connections. While the Marxist literature addressed itself to the importance of class, the non-Marxist literature eventually settled on the notion of interest group pluralism. Work in the 1950s focused on the limitless array of interests that could mobilize around the equally limitless range of policy issues. If people shared interests, they would likely form groups. If policy issues arose that affected those interests, then the groups would politicize and lobby government. The pluralist tradition de-emphasizes the state or policy-making institutions and stresses the influence of lobbies and interest-groups politics.

There are four major sources of inspiration for the concept of networks in political science. One of the first breaks with pluralism was over its portrait of the associational system. Empirical studies in that period showed that associational patterns were much more stable and relationships far more closed than the pluralists had suggested. Policy making took place not in the legislature or the executive but in “iron triangles,” which truly were subgovernments in that they might all be operating according to different principles, with different rhythms and often conflicting outcomes. By the mid-1970s, the notion of iron triangles seemed like a caricature too, and a new concept of “issue networks” arose.

A second important source of work on networks came from comparative research on industrial performance and economic policy. A key conditioning factor of foreign policy was the structure of domestic interests and institutions. This branch of research had offshoots that remain highly relevant to the work on policy networks today. Work on state structures argued that states had a clear pattern of associational and state institutions. For example, corporatist states had highly centralized associational systems, working in tandem with governments to develop and implement policy.

A third source of inspiration for network analysis was the growing work on new social movements and public interest groups. Social movement organizations rarely act alone, and they connect through various types of networks. The distinction between the movement and the organizations built [Page 1938]on it is important and gives a clue as to why the network idea spontaneously arose in this field of research. Any movement (e.g., environmental, consumers', women's) is bound to spawn a variety of organizations that address different aspects of its agenda, but those organizations will have a common cause and will seek to cooperate in order to maximize their policy impact.

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