Political bargaining on sustainable food system transformation: a network approach applied to Indonesia

Climate change, water pollution as well as biodiversity losses are the key challenges for nowadays environmental systems. In this regard, economic sectors are under pressure to find environmentally friendly production schemes. This also applies for agricultural production and the food sector. At the same time, a sustainable way of production and consumption requires society's welfare as well as food security. To this end, transformation processes are needed which implement policies to promote these different goals. However, the question arises how these processes can be designed in a way that efficient policies are chosen. In democratic systems, food system transformation is a policy field where several social groups with heterogeneous goals are involved. Thus, political processes correspond to multi-stakeholder processes with heterogeneous policy preferences. In these processes, formal power is distributed across executive and legislative agents. Furthermore, national business interest groups and civic social groups try to influence political decision makers to gain informal power. Accordingly, two network-based strands of lobbying have been proposed in the literature: power exchange, i.e. the exchange of influence resource and political control (Pappi/Henning, 1999), and communicational lobbying, i.e. influencing political actors by strategically providing expert knowledge (Austen-Smith, 1993; Ball,1995; Henning et al., 2019). The former corresponds to classical lobbying theory (Grossman and Helpman, 1996), while the latter assumes political decision makers are not perfectly informed about policies and their outcomes. Rather, they form naive mental models to reduce complexity. These policy beliefs are then influenced by interest groups and NGOs via communicational learning processes. Based upon this micro-political founded policy process framework, we empirically assess governance and lobbying structures in food system transformation in Indonesia. In particular, we combine a modified Baron-Ferejohn-model of non-cooperative legislative bargaining model with the above mentioned approaches of lobbying to a) derive power measures for the most important Indonesian stakeholder organisations across different constitutional settings and b) simulate final policy choices regarding climate protection and biodiversity policies. We apply this approach to Indonesia, where the core of the study corresponds to data from a stakeholder survey. It includes more than 60 of the most important stakeholder organisations in Indonesian agricultural policy. Data cover policy goals and concrete policy designs as well as network data on lobbying and communication. With this set-up we are able to assess the feasibility conditions of different policy designs, e.g. taxation of CO2 emissions, compensation payments for cutting emissions or regulative approaches, under different constitutional decision rules.