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Actors in forums: work input and different types of benefits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2022

Manuel Fischer Open the ORCID record for Manuel Fischer [Opens in a new window]  and
Simon Maag
Manuel Fischer*
Affiliation:
Department of Environmental Social Sciences, Eawag, Dübendorf, Switzerland Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Simon Maag
Affiliation:
Swiss Confederation Parliamentary Services, Bern, Switzerland
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: manuel.fischer@eawag.ch
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Abstract

Forums provide venues where different actors from the public administration sector, the interest group sector, or the research sector jointly discuss an issue of common interest. This article analyses which types of benefits are related to actors’ investing working time to forums. Actors’ dedication and work are basic predicates for forums to be able to produce outputs. The analysis of members of eight forums dealing with habitat and natural hazard governance in Switzerland suggests that actors participating in forums attribute more importance to exchange benefits, corresponding to opportunities of interaction with other actors – than to policy benefits – corresponding to opportunities for actors to influence policy or practice. However, more working time is invested by actors that lend importance to individual benefits – as opposed to collective benefits. These findings are important for understanding why actors provide work for forums in collaborative and polycentric governance systems.

Keywords

costs and benefits of participationforumgovernanceindividual and collective outputspolicymaking
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 573 - 592
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Supplementary material: Link

Fischer and Maag Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Z84HL0
Link
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Fischer and Maag supplementary material

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