Selective Policy Integration as a Strategic Modus of Coordinating Policy Sectors: Examples from Nature Conservation and Land-Use Policies in Germany

The concept of policy sectors reflects the horizontal fragmentation of politics. Being organised along issue areas across vertical political levels, developed policy sectors have their defined realms that are governed by specific actors with particular interests. Strongly fragmented structures of politics are a challenge for solving comprehensive and cross-cutting political problems, such as crime prevention, gender main-streaming, energy supply or sustainable development, that need integrated solutions. In these cases the coordination of concerned policy sectors is required. In our previous work we have developed the concept of “selective policy integration” that is a specific strategic mode of coordinating policy sectors. This paper aims to elaborate this concept and apply it to nature conservation and land-use policies such as agriculture, forestry and water management in Ger-many. Selective policy integration offers an effective strategy mode for those policy sectors who are in an inferior position regarding political power resources like regulating competences, budgets and informational influ-ence. Developed as an alternative oder supplement of vertical and horizontal policy integration, the selec-tive strategy operates directly in concrete situations that offer opportunities for integrating own sectoral concerns into specific political and legal programms. The sectoral forces are concentrated on selected promising activities. We examine the theoretical explications by examples from our field studies such as drinking water protec-tion cooperation, the greening of agriculture and invasive alien species. In the latter case, a developed strategy on this highly cross-sectoral issue indicated options for policy change, whereby many courses of action appeared in land-use policy sectors and needed inter-sectoral coordination. The nature conserva-tion sector partially succeeded by following the selective policy strategy. But in strong conflicts with pow-erfull land-use interests the strategy tends to fail. The cases show, that the potential for policy integration by coordinating sector policies iincreases in specific niches with low land-use interests.