Policy networks and foreign policies in South America: Comparing Argentina and Brazil in the case of forests

In recent decades, globalization has impacted all policy sectors. As a result of this trend the capacities of central foreign bureaucracies to oversee all foreign affairs, especially issue specific ones, are exceeded allowing other bureaucracies to expand and build up own units dealing with these issue-specific international relations in diverse policy sectors. Hence, foreign policies are determined by bargaining horizontally between bureaucracies with different interests within a state, competing with the once monopoly-holding foreign affairs bureaucracies and leading to a complex structure of a country’s foreign policy. In this context, Social Network Analysis, can be used to analyze the characteristics of horizontal, coordinating governance arrangements along two dimensions: the extent to which the relationships among actors vary in their degree and patterns of integration and the way power is distributed between the actors. Empirically, forests have been important issues in international policies since the Earth Summit in 1992. Consequently, countries’ bureaucracies have included forests as an issue in their foreign policy agendas with forest related bureaucracies becoming increasingly relevant in foreign policy. However, the forest sector has strong relations with the environmental, agricultural and industry sectors competing but also making coalitions based on the overlapping portions of their interests. South America, relatively more forested than any other region of the world and containing the Amazon rain forest, has received a lot of international attention being a crucial focus of global forest policy. However, most research on foreign policy focuses on developed countries from the Global North. However, the importance of forests as an issue widely varies between countries, which can be assumed having severe implications on a country’s foreign forest policy; while some countries like Brazil have forest-based economies, in other countries like Argentina the forest sector is negligible. This paper aims at comparing the foreign forest policy networks in two countries of South America with different forest importance, Argentina and Brazil, across time. In order to do so a two-stage strategy was employed, combining qualitative content analysis and social network analysis. Empirical indicators were used to describe foreign forest policy networks characteristics in each country. To identify changes, stability and diversification of the policy networks, a longitudinal analysis of membership and interactions was carried out along the period 1993 – 2023, using Dynamic Network Actor Models. Our results showed that in Brazil more actors and their coalitions were involved in the development of foreign forest policy, resulting in complex policy networks and limiting the autonomous agency the coalitions could perform. Contrary, in Argentina a limited set of actors and coalitions engaged, providing them with high degrees of autonomy. In both countries, however, the resulting foreign forest policy was greatly shaped by the most powerful actors in the networks. Specific conflicts in the coordination between forest foreign policies and other sectors’ foreign policies were observed in both countries. Forest foreign policy networks have become more complex over time, with new public and private actors observed in both countries.