Who drives cross-sectoral policy integration? The case of Swiss biodiversity policy

Complex environmental issues, such as climate change or the loss of biodiversity, are only effectively addressed with policies and processes coordinated within and across diverse policy sectors. However, the integration of an issue across policy sectors constitutes a major challenge to governance and policy-making, as many policy decisions are traditionally taken in sectoral silos. To achieve integration into sectoral policies, the issue has to be addressed by actors within and across these silos. Little is known, however, about which actors are propel this process. We thus ask: Who drives policy integration? Building on the concept of mainstreaming, we analyze the integration of a cross-cutting issue into policies of 20 different policy sectors over a period of 20 years, focusing on the behavior of specific types of actors present in the policy process. Specifically, we look at which actors involved in the parliamentary process in Switzerland are integrating the issue of biodiversity into sectoral policies. We study members of parliament (MPs) and government departments, taking into account their degree of specialization in sectors and their general emphasis on the biodiversity issue. We employ a quantitative approach by analyzing a comprehensive collection of documents introduced into the parliamentary process by either MPs or government departments, including parliamentary acts, transcripts, reports, draft laws, and others. We then use a combination of supervised text classification procedures to (1) classify all documents by their policy sector, (2) index the documents relevant to biodiversity. On the basis of the information thus obtained, we construct valued bipartite actor-sector networks in which actors are linked to sectors based on the number of documents relevant to biodiversity. To assess how certain actor attributes—namely issue specialization, sector specialization, and the actor type—increase the chance of tie formation, we eventually use a combination of descriptive and inferential network analysis (ERGMs). We find that most biodiversity-related documents come from sector specialists who address the issue only occasionally, and typically not in more than two different sectors. Actors with an increased interest in the issue tend to produce more documents, which are also distributed across a larger number of different sectors. For an increased sector specialization, the opposite is the case. This pattern is evident for both MPs and federal departments. Therefore, while policy integration is driven by issue specialists, it is the sector specialists on whom it depends whether integration succeeds. This submission is a contribution to the panel “From Texts to Networks: Semantic, Socio-Semantic, and Discourse Networks” (Political Networks, Panel 5).