Nature Conservation and Biodiversity Policy
Current project:
Titel: The influence of competing policy sectors and governmental parties on policy change in forest nature conservation
Project leader: Prof. Dr. Max Krott , Dr. Christiane Hubo
Research fellow: Max Göhrs, M.Sc. - max.goehrs@uni-goettingen.de
Funding: DFG
Term: 2017 – 2020
Summary:
The analysis focuses on the contribution of the competing policy sectors of Forestry and Nature Conservation in explaining changes in forest nature conservation policy. For the last 10 years changes in the goals and instruments of forest nature conservation policy at federal and elected state levels in Germany will be classified whether it goes in the direction of sustainable forestry or pure nature conservation. Up to now such change was explained mainly by discourse analyses leaving open the question about the role of power in shaping new programs for forest conservation. We focus on this gap in research by testing the main hypothesis that the change in forest nature conservation is driven by the power resources the different actors within the competing sectors are able to mobilize. The main hypothesis will be specified further on the power elements coercion, incentives and dominant information. Our second hypotheses is, that informational resources serve mostly to reach nature conservation oriented policy change, whereas regulation is used mostly to reach production oriented policy change. The ability to mobilize power resources is strongly influenced by the changing coalitions of political parties within government (hypotheses three).
The influence of policy sectors on policy change in forest nature conservation according to hypotheses one, and the importance of the different power resources according to hypotheses two will be analyzed in a qualitative manner applying the case study method. Beforehand, in order to get a wide variation for the selection of cases and to evaluate the influence of changing governmental parties according to hypotheses three, data on cases of policy change will be collected and there relation to the change of governmental parties will be analyzed, followed by an analyzes of party differences.
The explanations by power will add to the existing explanations based on discourses and deepen the understanding of policy change in forest nature conservation.
Contact: Christiane Hubo