Journal of International Relations and Development, Aug 30, 2014
This paper is concerned with Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and non-state actors. Globalisation ha... more This paper is concerned with Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and non-state actors. Globalisation has brought non-state actors back on the agenda of International Relations. As a result of globalisation, we witness at least some shift of authority from the state to non-state actors (the extent of which remains debated). Although most of the empirical studies focus on ‘domestic’ issues, there are good reasons to assume that foreign policy is equally affected by this trend. Not only are non-state actors autonomous actors in world politics, they are also increasingly involved in the making of states’ foreign policies. Following a discussion of the role of non-state actors in foreign policy, we ask to what extent FPA, IR’s actor-centric sub-field, has taken into account this growing importance of non-state actors. Given FPA’s criticism of seeing the state as a unitary actor, one would expect FPA scholars to be among the first within IR to analyse decision making involving non-state actors. A closer look however reveals that FPA remains focused mainly on state actors, while ignoring private, transnational and international ones. Thus, FPA remains in some way state-centric. We close with an outline of possible directions for further FPA research.
Contents:
- Multiple Actors in World Politics: An Attempt at Systematisation
- NSAs, ‘Rival Actorness’ and Hybrid Foreign Policymaking
- Non-state Actors and the FPA ‘Toolkit’
- The Methods of FPA — Suited for NSAs?
- NSAs and FPA Research: Centre Stage or on the Fringes?
- FPA 2.0: Studying Complex Foreign Policymaking in a Globalised World
Since the end of the Cold War and unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Un... more Since the end of the Cold War and unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Union (EU) has undergone significant changes. Once a model “Europeanist,” Germany has become increasingly reluctant to support the progressive implementation of key projects of European integration. Neither an instance of a planned strategic change nor a result of an inevitable adaptation to structural shifts at the systemic level, these changes in German foreign policy, incremental yet significant as they are, evade both deterministic and voluntaristic accounts of foreign policy change. Integrating insights from foreign policy analysis, integration theory, and social theory, the article develops an innovative framework for analysis that is applied to Germany's European asylum and refugee policy as well as its security and defense policy. The origins of both policy fields at the European level can be traced back to initiatives that were supported by or even originated in Germany. However, as the 1990s progressed Germany increasingly obstructed further institutionalization. While in the field of asylum and refugee policy the Amsterdam summit marks a clear turning point in Germany's position, the transformation of German policies on European security and defense proceeded rather as an incremental decrease in material support, aggravating substantive progress in the policy field more broadly. An unanticipated consequence of earlier initiatives, in both cases Germany has found it increasingly difficult to live up to the expectations it has helped to raise.
For most of the past century, Germany's attitudes towards and practices of war have deviated... more For most of the past century, Germany's attitudes towards and practices of war have deviated from those of other Western countries. After the conduct of war had been pushed to new extremes during the Third Reich, following the Second World War Germans turned into ...
The role civil-society organizations and other non-state actors play in global governance has rec... more The role civil-society organizations and other non-state actors play in global governance has received growing attention in recent years (to name just a few: Betsill/Corell 2008; Keck/Sikkink 1998; Steffek/Kissling/Nanz 2007; Tallberg/Jönsson 2010). Studies typically focus on their activities on the grassroots level, their participation in international conferences as registered observers and on the venues for NGO participation and consultation provided by different international organizations. What has rarely been studied so far in greater detail, however, is another form of opening up global governance to non-state actors.2 In many policy fields, when sending national delegations to bargain at an international conference, more and more states have opened up their delegation to one or several NGO members, to representatives of the business community or to external academic experts. Yet, we do know very little about this inclusion of non-state actors in state delegations at international conferences. Under which circumstances do states admit non-state actors, which kind of states embrace this legitimation strategy, which types of non-state actors do get access? Furthermore, what are the effects of non-state actor inclusion: does participation as part of a national delegation provide new forms of influence to non-state actors, or is this mostly a state strategy of disciplining and taming an otherwise inconvenient civil society?
This paper will make a first step in addressing these issues. It takes the Conferences of the Parties within the framework of the global climate change politics regime as a pilot study to analyze the determinants of non-state actor admission to state delegations. While climate change politics is a most-likely case for non-state actor participation and thus not representative of all policy fields, it is an ideal candidate for a pilot study, as we have abundant publicly available data and a broad variety of both actors and motivations to grant and deny their access to the state delegations.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, I will briefly describe the phenomenon of non-state actor inclusion in state delegations and formulate the research question more precisely. Pursuing this question will require to reflect on factors that might possibly explain why or under which conditions states may be ready to open up their delegation to representatives from civil society. The third section will then introduce fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the method used in this paper, whereas section four will present the research design of the analysis. Results of the analysis obtained so far will be discussed subsequently, leading to some preliminary conclusions at the end.
Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), the actor-centric sub-field of International Relations (IR), focus... more Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), the actor-centric sub-field of International Relations (IR), focuses on the process of foreign-policy decision-making. FPA scholars were among the first theorists within IR to open up the black box of the state. Taking in insights from a number of disciplines like social psychology, sociology and anthropology, these scholars ask how (groups of) individuals make foreign-policy decisions. A different strand of IR research has argued that during the past few decades, processes of internationalization, privatization and transnationalization have significantly altered the way international politics is conducted today. Once the privileged actors, foreign offices have increasingly faced competition not only from other ministries and government agencies but also from non-state actors and from international organizations. This paper asks how these trends have shaped the roles and behavior of foreign policy practitioners and to what extent researchers have taken them up. Due to their focus on actors and processes, one would expect FPA scholars to be among the first to include non-state actors in their frameworks. By means of a meta-analysis of articles that have appeared in the journal “Foreign Policy Analysis”, we show, however, that FPA research pays surprisingly little attention to these changes. We argue that this is mainly the case because FPA has remained largely state-centric – not in the sense of taking states as unitary actors, of course, but in the sense of mostly focusing on governmental actors as well as domestic private actors. The consequence is a neglec of transnational and non-state actors which are emerging as important players in the foreign-policy game. By giving up this kind of state-centrism, FPA could often bette grasp the patterns of governance in a denationalizing world, and it could make a vital contribution to the body of research on globalization and state transformation.
Im Zentrum dieses vollständig aktualisierten Lehrbuchs steht die Analyse deutscher Außenpolitik. ... more Im Zentrum dieses vollständig aktualisierten Lehrbuchs steht die Analyse deutscher Außenpolitik. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf einer problemorientierten Einführung anhand gängiger theoretischer und methodischer Instrumentarien, wie sie in der Außenpolitikanalyse zur Anwendung kommen. Die Leserinnen und Leser sollen mit unterschiedlichen Herangehensweisen vertraut gemacht werden, damit sie die Zusammenhänge zwischen theoretischen Perspektiven und entsprechenden Forschungsmethoden auf der einen Seite und konkreten Gegenständen der empirischen Analyse deutscher Außenpolitik auf der anderen Seite besser verstehen und dabei sowohl die Chancen wie auch die Grenzen der jeweiligen Perspektiven erkennen lernen. Für die zweite Auflage wurde das Buch umfassend überarbeitet.
Journal of International Relations and Development, Aug 30, 2014
This paper is concerned with Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and non-state actors. Globalisation ha... more This paper is concerned with Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and non-state actors. Globalisation has brought non-state actors back on the agenda of International Relations. As a result of globalisation, we witness at least some shift of authority from the state to non-state actors (the extent of which remains debated). Although most of the empirical studies focus on ‘domestic’ issues, there are good reasons to assume that foreign policy is equally affected by this trend. Not only are non-state actors autonomous actors in world politics, they are also increasingly involved in the making of states’ foreign policies. Following a discussion of the role of non-state actors in foreign policy, we ask to what extent FPA, IR’s actor-centric sub-field, has taken into account this growing importance of non-state actors. Given FPA’s criticism of seeing the state as a unitary actor, one would expect FPA scholars to be among the first within IR to analyse decision making involving non-state actors. A closer look however reveals that FPA remains focused mainly on state actors, while ignoring private, transnational and international ones. Thus, FPA remains in some way state-centric. We close with an outline of possible directions for further FPA research.
Contents:
- Multiple Actors in World Politics: An Attempt at Systematisation
- NSAs, ‘Rival Actorness’ and Hybrid Foreign Policymaking
- Non-state Actors and the FPA ‘Toolkit’
- The Methods of FPA — Suited for NSAs?
- NSAs and FPA Research: Centre Stage or on the Fringes?
- FPA 2.0: Studying Complex Foreign Policymaking in a Globalised World
Since the end of the Cold War and unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Un... more Since the end of the Cold War and unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Union (EU) has undergone significant changes. Once a model “Europeanist,” Germany has become increasingly reluctant to support the progressive implementation of key projects of European integration. Neither an instance of a planned strategic change nor a result of an inevitable adaptation to structural shifts at the systemic level, these changes in German foreign policy, incremental yet significant as they are, evade both deterministic and voluntaristic accounts of foreign policy change. Integrating insights from foreign policy analysis, integration theory, and social theory, the article develops an innovative framework for analysis that is applied to Germany's European asylum and refugee policy as well as its security and defense policy. The origins of both policy fields at the European level can be traced back to initiatives that were supported by or even originated in Germany. However, as the 1990s progressed Germany increasingly obstructed further institutionalization. While in the field of asylum and refugee policy the Amsterdam summit marks a clear turning point in Germany's position, the transformation of German policies on European security and defense proceeded rather as an incremental decrease in material support, aggravating substantive progress in the policy field more broadly. An unanticipated consequence of earlier initiatives, in both cases Germany has found it increasingly difficult to live up to the expectations it has helped to raise.
For most of the past century, Germany's attitudes towards and practices of war have deviated... more For most of the past century, Germany's attitudes towards and practices of war have deviated from those of other Western countries. After the conduct of war had been pushed to new extremes during the Third Reich, following the Second World War Germans turned into ...
The role civil-society organizations and other non-state actors play in global governance has rec... more The role civil-society organizations and other non-state actors play in global governance has received growing attention in recent years (to name just a few: Betsill/Corell 2008; Keck/Sikkink 1998; Steffek/Kissling/Nanz 2007; Tallberg/Jönsson 2010). Studies typically focus on their activities on the grassroots level, their participation in international conferences as registered observers and on the venues for NGO participation and consultation provided by different international organizations. What has rarely been studied so far in greater detail, however, is another form of opening up global governance to non-state actors.2 In many policy fields, when sending national delegations to bargain at an international conference, more and more states have opened up their delegation to one or several NGO members, to representatives of the business community or to external academic experts. Yet, we do know very little about this inclusion of non-state actors in state delegations at international conferences. Under which circumstances do states admit non-state actors, which kind of states embrace this legitimation strategy, which types of non-state actors do get access? Furthermore, what are the effects of non-state actor inclusion: does participation as part of a national delegation provide new forms of influence to non-state actors, or is this mostly a state strategy of disciplining and taming an otherwise inconvenient civil society?
This paper will make a first step in addressing these issues. It takes the Conferences of the Parties within the framework of the global climate change politics regime as a pilot study to analyze the determinants of non-state actor admission to state delegations. While climate change politics is a most-likely case for non-state actor participation and thus not representative of all policy fields, it is an ideal candidate for a pilot study, as we have abundant publicly available data and a broad variety of both actors and motivations to grant and deny their access to the state delegations.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, I will briefly describe the phenomenon of non-state actor inclusion in state delegations and formulate the research question more precisely. Pursuing this question will require to reflect on factors that might possibly explain why or under which conditions states may be ready to open up their delegation to representatives from civil society. The third section will then introduce fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the method used in this paper, whereas section four will present the research design of the analysis. Results of the analysis obtained so far will be discussed subsequently, leading to some preliminary conclusions at the end.
Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), the actor-centric sub-field of International Relations (IR), focus... more Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), the actor-centric sub-field of International Relations (IR), focuses on the process of foreign-policy decision-making. FPA scholars were among the first theorists within IR to open up the black box of the state. Taking in insights from a number of disciplines like social psychology, sociology and anthropology, these scholars ask how (groups of) individuals make foreign-policy decisions. A different strand of IR research has argued that during the past few decades, processes of internationalization, privatization and transnationalization have significantly altered the way international politics is conducted today. Once the privileged actors, foreign offices have increasingly faced competition not only from other ministries and government agencies but also from non-state actors and from international organizations. This paper asks how these trends have shaped the roles and behavior of foreign policy practitioners and to what extent researchers have taken them up. Due to their focus on actors and processes, one would expect FPA scholars to be among the first to include non-state actors in their frameworks. By means of a meta-analysis of articles that have appeared in the journal “Foreign Policy Analysis”, we show, however, that FPA research pays surprisingly little attention to these changes. We argue that this is mainly the case because FPA has remained largely state-centric – not in the sense of taking states as unitary actors, of course, but in the sense of mostly focusing on governmental actors as well as domestic private actors. The consequence is a neglec of transnational and non-state actors which are emerging as important players in the foreign-policy game. By giving up this kind of state-centrism, FPA could often bette grasp the patterns of governance in a denationalizing world, and it could make a vital contribution to the body of research on globalization and state transformation.
Im Zentrum dieses vollständig aktualisierten Lehrbuchs steht die Analyse deutscher Außenpolitik. ... more Im Zentrum dieses vollständig aktualisierten Lehrbuchs steht die Analyse deutscher Außenpolitik. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf einer problemorientierten Einführung anhand gängiger theoretischer und methodischer Instrumentarien, wie sie in der Außenpolitikanalyse zur Anwendung kommen. Die Leserinnen und Leser sollen mit unterschiedlichen Herangehensweisen vertraut gemacht werden, damit sie die Zusammenhänge zwischen theoretischen Perspektiven und entsprechenden Forschungsmethoden auf der einen Seite und konkreten Gegenständen der empirischen Analyse deutscher Außenpolitik auf der anderen Seite besser verstehen und dabei sowohl die Chancen wie auch die Grenzen der jeweiligen Perspektiven erkennen lernen. Für die zweite Auflage wurde das Buch umfassend überarbeitet.
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Contents:
- Multiple Actors in World Politics: An Attempt at Systematisation
- NSAs, ‘Rival Actorness’ and Hybrid Foreign Policymaking
- Non-state Actors and the FPA ‘Toolkit’
- The Methods of FPA — Suited for NSAs?
- NSAs and FPA Research: Centre Stage or on the Fringes?
- FPA 2.0: Studying Complex Foreign Policymaking in a Globalised World
This paper will make a first step in addressing these issues. It takes the Conferences of the Parties within the framework of the global climate change politics regime as a pilot study to analyze the determinants of non-state actor admission to state delegations. While climate change politics is a most-likely case for non-state actor participation and thus not representative of all policy fields, it is an ideal candidate for a pilot study, as we have abundant publicly available data and a broad variety of both actors and motivations to grant and deny their access to the state delegations.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, I will briefly describe the phenomenon of non-state actor inclusion in state delegations and formulate the research question more precisely. Pursuing this question will require to reflect on factors that might possibly explain why or under which conditions states may be ready to open up their delegation to representatives from civil society. The third section will then introduce fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the method used in this paper, whereas section four will present the research design of the analysis. Results of the analysis obtained so far will be discussed subsequently, leading to some preliminary conclusions at the end.
Contents:
- Multiple Actors in World Politics: An Attempt at Systematisation
- NSAs, ‘Rival Actorness’ and Hybrid Foreign Policymaking
- Non-state Actors and the FPA ‘Toolkit’
- The Methods of FPA — Suited for NSAs?
- NSAs and FPA Research: Centre Stage or on the Fringes?
- FPA 2.0: Studying Complex Foreign Policymaking in a Globalised World
This paper will make a first step in addressing these issues. It takes the Conferences of the Parties within the framework of the global climate change politics regime as a pilot study to analyze the determinants of non-state actor admission to state delegations. While climate change politics is a most-likely case for non-state actor participation and thus not representative of all policy fields, it is an ideal candidate for a pilot study, as we have abundant publicly available data and a broad variety of both actors and motivations to grant and deny their access to the state delegations.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, I will briefly describe the phenomenon of non-state actor inclusion in state delegations and formulate the research question more precisely. Pursuing this question will require to reflect on factors that might possibly explain why or under which conditions states may be ready to open up their delegation to representatives from civil society. The third section will then introduce fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the method used in this paper, whereas section four will present the research design of the analysis. Results of the analysis obtained so far will be discussed subsequently, leading to some preliminary conclusions at the end.