Revealing belief formation processes of communicational versus observational learning: the case EU Common Fisheries Policy

The manner political actors formulate their beliefs under conditions of exogenous shocks and environmental or scientific uncertainty may be crucial to the understanding of policy processes and outcomes (Hall, 1993; Fischer, 2015). Social network theories (SNA) to identify belief formation processes, policy learning, and belief updating at an organizational level may shed more light on additional factors driving policy failures, as well as potential solutions (Williams, 2001). The EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) as a basic legislation for the management of fisheries in Europe and beyond, last reformed in 2013, and its component of fishing opportunities quota allocation is prominent. The EU is still taking political decisions leading to overfishing of approximately 40% of the fish stocks, despite EU commitment in the CFP to reach Maximum Sustainable Yield levels by 2020. As a result, EU fish stocks biomass has been depleted (STECF, 2023), implying a policy outcome failure. Belief formation and updating may be derived either from communicational learning or from observational learning (Henning et al., 2018). We define communicational learning as based on the information exchange network structure, observational learning relies more on how actors trust and self-interpret environmental or socio-economical signals to formulate their responses and positions. Observational learning may interact or be independent of communicational learning, relying more heavily on trust in organizational knowledge and beliefs on responses rather than trusting external information, and through complex contagion ties (Gronow et al., 2021). The poor status of fish stocks combined with the potential impacts of climate change and high scientific uncertainty in the formulation of scientific advice is providing also the opportunity to investigate belief formation under high uncertainty scenarios and plausible shocks, and therefore hypotheses building the need to "do something" reaction may override information exchange and collaboration ties (Grossman, 2012) and prioritize own beliefs. Data was collected using a quantitative network survey through stakeholder interviews for interest groups (industry, environment, consumer organizations), political actors (EU Commission, COREPER, National Ministries), and scientific bodies and institutions. Four stakeholder networks were measured: reputation (influence), information exchange, support, and social networks. This paper will focus on information and social networks. We tested the level of trust in external information of three main policy instrument knowledge issues of the CFP (quota setting, fishing closures, and technical gear measures) which allowed us to calculate the weight of observational (own interpretation) versus communicational (external) learning, as well as test the social and influence network actors, ties within a multi-level process. We tested the extent of informational influence of central key coordinators of EU-level, regional, and national coalitions, which are functioning as brokers between the multilevel layers, and the degree of their information lobbying influence (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993). This study thus contributes empirically and methodologically to network-based analyses of belief formation and policy learning processes of environmental governance topics where there may be a high belief mismatch between central actors.