Is creating an opportunity to learn enough? The role of mediation in collaborative network aimed at policy learning

Our article offers empirical insight into the discussion on how mediation contributes to policy learning, and the role of social contagion in this process. Collective policy-making processes in complex modern democracies often involve a variety of organizations embedded complex communication structures: groups of organizations and organizational representatives draft and redraft and discuss and send information in bilateral exchanges, smaller groups and plenaries. Whether policy learning can result from such a process depends on, among other things, the structure of the emerging communication network, and specifically the role of mediating organizations making sure information is passed on where it needs to be, conflicts are dealt with and different knowledge bases translated. We analyse an example of such a process with network and qualitative methods. Our material is based on Estonia, a forest rich country in Europe, characterized by wide social conflict over forest governance in recent years. In order to address these conflicts, Estonian Ministry of Environment made an unprecedented effort in organizing a cross-sectoral collaborative platform for the creation of the Forestry Policy Development Plan for the next decade. Although the platform bought together 42 organizations in intense information exchange and negotiations aimed at achieving agreement over forest policy, the platform was disbanded after two years without achieving its aims. We measured information exchange, trust and beliefs among the members of the policy network before and after the intervention, and conducted extensive interviews during and after the process. Based on the data, we conclude that one of the main deficits in the collaboration process was of mediation. Qualitative data indicates that ministry in charge of collaboration took a passive role and expected administrative rules and procedures to result in consensual agreement. Survey data indicates that clusters of information exchange and reciprocal trust among the policy network largely coincides. We hypothesize that while collaboration process itself contributes to increasing both information exchange and reciprocal trust between actors of the network, a prerequisite for learning, mediation of this dispersed information is required for collective-level policy learning. We further analyse the role of social contagion in the change in reciprocal trust in received information before and after the intervention and hypothesize that network structure influences on who information is exchanged with and to what extent this information is trustworthy. The second hypothesis would reinforce our suggestion that in the absence of formal mediation effort, informal social contagion influences whose information is trusted and who’s not.