Policy integration: Do laws or actors integrate issues relevant to flood risk management in Switzerland?
Introduction
Climate-related extremes such as heat waves, droughts and floods are expected to increase in intensity and frequency as a consequence of climate change following the Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014). In order to buffer the effects of such climate-related extreme events, the IPCC and scholars across disciplines call for adaptive governance structures (IPCC 2014, Lavell et al. 2012, Dupuis and Biesbroek 2013, Neil Adger et al. 2005, Berrang-Ford et al. 2011). However, there remain many open questions about how adaptive governance can be achieved. One important aspect of adaptive governance is policy integration (Ansell and Gash 2008, Folke et al. 2005). Scholars emphasize the importance of cross-sectoral policy integration where policy issues are ecologically (Bodin and Tengö 2012), geographically or functionally inter-dependent (Ingold et al. 2018). Adapting to such existing interdependencies enables societies to a) make use of synergies such that policies reinforce their effects across sectors, or b) buffer negative effects of climate change in one sector through policy action in another sector. The academic literature concludes that integrated policy sectors enhance adaptive governance capacities (Trein et al. 2017, Rouillard et al. 2013, Mawson and Hall 2000, Biesbroek et al. 2010, Gallopín 2006).
We define integration as the joint action on policy issues whenever issues exhibit interdependencies. Integration occurs, for example, if a given sector takes policy issues, goals, or instruments of adjacent policy sectors into account in order to make use of co-benefits (Giessen 2011). The concept of cross-sectoral policy integration assumes that the failure and success of policies crucially depend on how well policies are integrated across adjacent sectors. In flood risk management, for example, cross-sectoral policy integration plays a crucial role in sectors as diverse as spatial planning, forest, water protection, construction, or climate change. Spatial planning that inhibits constructions in flood-prone areas also prevents future flooding damage along with the need to make further investments in expensive floodwalls.
The question of how cross-sectoral policy integration operates has generated substantial research. Two bodies of scholarship focus on different aspects of integration (Christensen and Lægreid 2007). The first emphasizes the importance of an integrated legal framework, whereby laws or other types of legal documents institutionalize the integration of issues across sectors. A second body of literature focuses on actors’ activities, whereby actors take into account interdependencies among issues. Building on these strands of literature, we explore two phenomena that might contribute to both types of cross-sectoral policy integration. More specifically, we explore what we term law-based issue integration (the legal framework cross-referencing issues) and actor-based issue integration (actors working on issues). Actual policy integration involves more than the connections between issues based on laws or actors, but the latter can be an important element for achieving the former.
A first contribution of our paper is the joint analysis of law-based and actor-based issue integration. The relationship between the two is potentially complex since both can mutually reinforce one another where high (or low) levels of law- and actor-based integration are simultaneously present. Likewise, both types of issue integration can potentially complement each other. If the legal framework does not integrate issues across sectors, actors can still do so by considering interdependent issues within their work portfolios, or vice versa. We analyze this relationship using an empirical analysis of flood risk management in Switzerland—a country that is likely to be strongly affected by climate change-induced floods in the future (FOEN 2014).
In our second contribution we explore a way to quantitatively assess both types of issue integration. The significance of most existing studies on policy integration lies in their qualitative case contributions, but systematic comparisons are rare (notable exceptions include Ekstrom et al. 2009, Young 2002). By contrast, we assess law- and actor-based integration by means of combining two datasets. The first dataset serves to quantify law-based integration between issues. Here, we coded the occurrence of a set of flood relevant issues in legislative texts (laws and ordinances) across a wide range of policy sectors. The second dataset captures actor-based integration. We gathered data on actors in a nation-wide survey in order to assess the activity profiles of a broad set of organizational actors central to Swiss flood governance. Combining both datasets, we represent the integration of issues as networks (Bodin and Crona, 2009, Ekstrom et al. 2009, Bodin and Nohrstedt 2016), whereby the degree to which issues can be connected varies, either by joint laws or joint actors.
Our third contribution is that we complement the literature on social-ecological fit, which argues that integration in the environmental system should be reflected in the integration of the social system (e.g., Bodin 2017, Bodin and Crona, 2009, Young et al. 2006, Gallopín 2006). Our paper contributes to the fit literature by analyzing the social bases, including laws and actors, for issue-integration.
Section snippets
Theory
Policies are often organized into separate sectors, such as trade, foreign affairs, or environmental protection. A policy sector is defined as including all policies and actors “concerned with formulating, advocating, and selecting courses of action to solve that domain’s problem” (Knoke 1994, p. 279). Policy sectors are typically specialized on one or a few policy issues. We define policy issues as societal problems addressed by means of political solutions. Issues are often interdependent
Climate change and flood protection in Switzerland
This article examines climate adaptation policies (Dupuis and Biesbroek 2013, Neil Adger et al. 2005, Berrang-Ford et al. 2011) by focusing on flood risk management in Switzerland—a country in which climate change-induced floods are projected to cause a high level of concern in the future (FOEN 2014). Additionally, Switzerland has a long history of floods and flood risk management to draw upon (FOWG 2003). Flood policies developed from technical, construction-focused approaches and have since
Methods
The analyses can be replicated using data and scripts hosted in the online open repository: https://doi.org/10.25678/0000zz. We measure law-based issue integration by means of the co-occurrence of issues in the same law (see top part of Fig. 1). In order to do so, we multiplied the raw rectangular occurrence matrix of issues across articles with its transpose to generate a co-occurrence matrix. We then normalized this matrix by calculating Ochiai similarities between issues, which enabled us to
Results and discussion
Results in Fig. 2, Fig. 3 graphically illustrate that both law- and actor-based issue integration play a role in Swiss flood risk management. Further, the results of our statistical modeling (reported in the Appendix B) let us conclude that the association between our measures for both bases of integration is unlikely to be random, nor can it be completely explained by other factors endogenous to the data-generating process or based on actor attributes. These results are evidenced by a large
Conclusions
In this paper we distinguish between two bases for cross-sectoral policy integration: law- and actor-based issue integration, with issue integration referring to the integration of interdependent issues either through laws or actors. This specific focus on issue integration adds to the study of cross-sectoral policy integration, which conceptualizes integration as a phenomenon within the social system whereby laws can be integrated or actors can collaborate. By contrast, this paper explores
Funding
This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 149410].
Acknowledgements
A special note of thank you goes to Andrea Ghisletta who greatly contributed to gathering data for this article. Moreover, we would like to thank Rosalie Lipfert for her proof-reading work; Örjan Bodin, Mark Lubell, Karin Ingold, Eva Lieberherr and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive inputs.
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