The Politics of Innovation: Understanding Actors’ Interactions in Complex Governance Environments

What governments desire to achieve, and how they want accomplish their goals represent the core of decision-making processes. However, in cases of policy sectors characterised by multi issue, multi-level and multi-actor dynamics (Chou et, al. 2017), such as the case of innovation policy, governance systems have experienced an increase in their complexity. Due to the transversal nature of innovation issues, a growing number of cross-sectorial links have been created to design new interventions. Therefore, the paper examines how the heterogeneous ecology of actors involved in the national governance of scientific and technological innovation, has exploited these connections to steer the policy making process. By means of a comparative analysis between Italy and France I illustrate how different actors have been able to mould policy instrument components and, in turn, the resulting policy design features. Through Qualitative Data Analysis techniques, I analyse different type of sources (policy documents, party manifestos and semi-structured interviews), with the purpose of understanding actors’ perceptions on various goals and instruments. Then, by interpreting their preferences in the light of different political time spans (change in cabinet composition), I identify their patterns of interaction and shed light on how these can help explaining instruments’ choices undertaken by various governments. The paper has two goals. The first aims at contributing to the literature on innovation policy from a political angle. The second is to provide an actor-centred perspective on the analysis of policy making processes.