Understanding networked advocacy in the multilevel policy process for halting deforestation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

This paper advances our understanding of networked advocacy – loose mobilising structures founded on “weak” online ties between policy actors – in the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). We apply our investigation to the politics of deforestation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In the paper, we argue that the expansion of information technology and new media is challenging established forms of policy communication across policy domains and geographies by providing coalitions with new tools to expand the scope of policy issues and pool influence to pursue their policy goals. In particular, the paper complements the ACF with perspectives on networked advocacy to frame “donor dynamics” as an advocacy strategy that takes advantage of the multilevel architecture of the policy process to channel influence on national brick-and-mortar institutions by appealing to international actors and their constituencies. Such an architecture describes the deforestation domain in the country that holds one of the largest areas of primary rainforest in the Congo Basin, and in which the politics of halting deforestation are condensed into conflicts between conservation, humanitarian goals, and the continuation of (unsustainable) resource exploitation by domestic and international business interests. To analyse the role of networked advocacy for coalition formation and advocacy strategies, we apply network methods to Twitter data on retweets and mentions between 150 key policy organisations and their affiliates since 2017 when DRC ratified the Paris Agremeent. As retweeting translates into potentially risky endorsement of politically charged content, filtering the retweet networks by keywords allows for determining the decisive features of advocacy coalitions: coordination and shared beliefs. The paper concludes by proposing areas for future work on networked advocacy that serve to promote the applicability of the ACF to policy contexts in the DRC, the Congo Basin, and beyond.