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Policy forums: Why do they exist and what are they used for?

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Abstract

Policy forums are issue-based intermediary organizations where diverse types of political and societal actors repeatedly interact. Policy forums are important elements of modern governance systems as they allow actors to learn, negotiate, or build trust. They can vary in composition, size, membership logic, and other distinct features. This article lays the foundation of a theory of policy forums based on three interrelated elements: First, it discusses conditions for the formation of a forum and describes the logic of these organizations as one of an asymmetric multipartite exchange. Second, it enumerates the potential set of goals and motivations of participating actors that are fed into this exchange. Third, it proposes eight different dimensions on which policy forums differ and which affect the exchange mechanisms among actors. We claim that empirical work on policy forums should systematically take these elements into account and propose elements of a research agenda.

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Notes

  1. These concepts are all interchangeably called “policy forums” in the remainder of this article because we would like to provide a unified framework for their analysis.

  2. An example is the Global Policy Forum with its advocacy for accountability and citizen participation.

  3. It may be possible to understand policy forums and participation of actors therein based on other theoretical premises. For example, sociological institutionalism would posit that all forums take a similar form because of prevalent norms in the wider political system (“institutional isomorphism,” see DiMaggio and Powell 1983) or that actors participate in forums due to mutually shared norms in a policy sector. Similarly, governance approaches would emphasize that forums per se come about as a functional requirement of horizontal coordination between political actors (Powell 1990). However, while insights from these theoretical strands may be valuable for explaining the existence of a phenomenon like policy forums per se, only an individual rational-choice institutionalist account permits us to discriminate between the different characteristics of policy forums and the actors’ related individual resources and needs.

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  1. Department of Environmental Social Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Acquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), Überlandstrasse 133, 8600, Dübendorf, Switzerland

    Manuel Fischer & Philip Leifeld

  2. Institute of Political Science, University of Berne, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Manuel Fischer & Philip Leifeld

  3. Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstrasse 10, 78457, Konstanz, Germany

    Philip Leifeld

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Fischer, M., Leifeld, P. Policy forums: Why do they exist and what are they used for?. Policy Sci 48, 363–382 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-015-9224-y

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