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WEEK 3 READING 1 - Committing to an Issue: Building Agendas - Coggle…
WEEK 3 READING 1 - Committing to an Issue: Building Agendas
Many issues never reach the agenda because opposing groups successfully use tactics to keep them off the agenda.
TAKING THE FIRST STEP:
While your distant challenge may be to develop a proposal to help a certain population and perhaps secure funding for this help, your immediate challenge is to convince others, preferably decision makers, that the problem merits their serious attention.
In the preliminary phase, you must place the issue on the agenda so that someone (an executive, a staff committee, or a committee of your agency's board) will examine the issue in more detail or delegate it to others for further exploration.
Skilful policy practitioners who are building an agenda try to create favourable conditions, interest, and support for a policy reform at the outset.
WHY IS AGENDA BUILDING NEEDED?
LEGISLATORS:
They must limit the number of issues they consider and must prioritise them.
They often avoid issues that appear to give them little or no political advantage in re-election. A particular issue may seem too controversial or may antagonise an important faction or interest group, even if it pleases other people.
They may opportunistically select issues that will give them media exposure and a resultant advantage over their opponents in an upcoming election battle.
AGENCIES:
Agency executives must manage organisations, raise funds, hire staff, adjudicate conflicts and plan - tasks that occupy most of their working hours.
In light of these many tasks, executives must ignore or defer many issues, even ones that seem important to a staff member, a board member, or client. If they were to examine each issue in considerable details, they would become exhausted and frustrated.
Executives also ignore or defer certain issues because they would embroil the agency in conflict. Often they act only when they are convinced that an issue merits attention in spite of possible political conflict and the time and effort it may take.
Often more than staff, executives take a strategic view of their agencies, wanting policies that will give them a competitive advantage over other agencies.
Policy advocates must develop a strategy to convince agency executives that their issues merit attention. When they succeed in placing an issue on the agendas of executives and agency boards, they do not necessarily succeed in getting them to enact new policies or to accept policy innovations, but at least the proposals have a better chance of success than if these executives and boards develop little or no interest in the issue.
COMMUNITIES:
Community activists may introduce ideas to community groups, the media, the city council, school boards and other community influentials.
Activists may draw attention to a policy proposal by getting a story in the mass media, holding a community forum, or staging a protest.
They my inject the issue into a campaign for city council or school board elections, with the ultimate objective of persuading community decision makers to prioritise it in their deliberations.
CHALLENGES FOR POLICY PRACTITIONERS IN AGENDA BUILDING:
1. Diagnosing the context as they listen to others:
Policy advocates need to diagnose the context to identify contextual constraints and opportunities as they listen to others.
If they decide that specific policies will be extremely difficult to change, they must do considerable work to change the context or to focus on alternative policy changes.
When they decide that the contextual opportunities far outnumber constraints, they can initiate a policy-changing strategy at once.
2. Softening or moderating the context:
Having diagnosed the context, policy advocates must soften or moderate it - they must make it more amenable to a specific policy initiative.
3. Activating change:
At some point, they need to get a community decision maker or legislator to put an issue on the agenda of the other decision makers in the agency, community, or legislative setting.
THE DIAGNOSING/LISTENING PHASE:
When diagnosing the context, policy advocates must analyse streams of problems and solutions, recent professional decisions and trends, and political realities.
1. Streams of problems and solutions:
When beginning their work, they must consider the kinds of problems and solutions that have already been considered in a setting (agency, community or legislative setting).
It allows them to discover where their issue fits into the larger picture. It also gives them a better sense of their issues prognosis.
We can classify solutions into three broad groups: a proposed specific program, correcting institutional problems, proposed method of making decisions (eg setting up a task force or committee).
2. Recent Professional Development and Trends:
Fads and trends can powerfully shape the prognosis of a policy reform.
They can be discerned by examining professional journals, conversing with professionals and analysing the kinds of innovations that funders prioritise.
It is important to be familiar with the culture of specific settings to better understand the kinds of innovations that are relatively feasible in them, while also realising that decision makers sometimes make policy choices that are discrepant with these traditions.
3. Political Realities:
When working on a policy or reform, advocates need to consider the viewpoint of important officials by finding out what position they have taken on similar issues or reforms in the past.
They must also understand the viewpoints of the public as reflected in polls or in recently contested elections.
They must also consider the extent to which a policy reform is likely to receive sympathetic coverage in the mass media as reflected by media coverage of similar issues in the past.
OTHER CHALLENGES INCLUDE:
The magnitude of policy change; large changes are often more difficult to obtain than more modest changes.
Whether an issue is already politicised; if the issue has already exited considerable political conflict, it is likely to be associated with political conflict when re-introduced.
Whether persons with considerable power believe that specific policy changes will harm their economic, professional or political self interest.
Whether a specific reform will be expensive or difficult to implement.
2. SOFTENING OR MODERATING STAGE:
Policy advocates can sometimes attempt to improve the prognosis of a policy reform even before it enters policy deliberations by working in problem and solution streams and building political support.
1. Working in Problem and Solution Streams:
Those who want decision makers to take their problem seriously have to convince them it is a problem and not merely a condition (as problems poses a threat or danger to a specific group).
Agency executives are more likely to support a reform if they think not doing so will have negative consequences for them.
Policy advocates can use data to demonstrate that a specific social problem has important implications that extend beyond a specific issue or population.
Advocates must also demonstrate that a problem is not hopeless and can be ameliorated. They can do so by citing research or finding successful pilot projects that demonstrate that specific reform could well yield positive outcomes.
They can appeal to ethical values such as the ethical principles of beneficence, social justice and fairness by arguing that society has a duty to address an issue.
2. Building Political Support:
They can soften the context by diminishing opposition to a specific reform.
They can directly address the concerns or objections people may have, and can correct erroneous information.
It is often effective to co-opt people by asking for their suggestions; as they offer guidance about how to proceed, they sometimes unwittingly become part of the change effort.
Advocates must be open to input from a variety of people, have good listening skills to understand various perspectives, and be willing to compromise.
Advocates can point to funding trends, court rulings, or professional developments that support change in agency policy.
THE ACTIVATING STAGE:
This is where a policy entrepreneur (a decision maker, legislator, chairperson or executive) pulls an issue onto an agenda so that it will receive serious consideration.
To do so, the policy entrepreneur uses tactics including:
Timing and windows of opportunity
Coupling (Making imaginative connections among the solution, problem and political streams)
Framing and finding titles (put a twist on proposals to make them appealing to decision makers)
Negotiating and bargaining
Assembling Early Sponsors and Supporters (Enlisting people to sponsor the proposal by putting their names on it)
Routing (influencing who gets jurisdiction to make the decision)
Media coverage
TIMING AND WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY:
Key events often sensitise legislators to a specific issue. Dramatic and publicised stories may make them suddenly alive to specific needs.
A task force may issue a report that alerts people to a specific problem.
When the media cover such events extensively, public opinion may encourage legislators or heads of government departments to consider a proposal.
Pivotal events in the political stream stir up support for a specific problem or solution.
The arrival of a new executive director or other high-level staff can create opportunity.
Regular, predictable windows of opportunity exist during annual budget preparations.
NEGOTIATING AND BARGAINING:
Even though policy proposals are not fully developed until an issue has entered policy deliberations, policy entrepreneurs often develop their tentative outlines before this stage.
They often try to create a win-win atmosphere that allows different people and factions to believe they will each have a piece of the action.
If you give people a chance not only to discuss the proposal but also to offer suggestions about its implementation, oppositions to it is likely to decrease, and the reform is more likely to be approved.
GARBAGE CAN THEORY:
Ideas bubble up regarding problems (eg social problems, service delivery problems, admin problems) and solutions (same examples). These may surface at staff or committee meetings, or at a retreat of the executives and the board.
Even when agency members and executives consider an issue to be short-lived, these problems and solutions often retain a place in their memories, remaining in a state of limbo - a figurative garbage can - until they are placed on the agendas of decision makers at a later point in time as they recall them.
Similarly, we can say that the myriad problems and solutions exist in the garbage cans of legislatures.
Agenda building is a precursor to actual deliberations. It merely gets specific issues or policies on the table, to be followed by actual deliberations, where they are processed by committees and legislatures.
Some of the issues and policies are sifted out, defeated, cast aside and tabled during the deliberative process.
FACTORS TO CONSIDER IN DIFFERENT SETTINGS:
(That shape the prognosis of the reform)
Agency Setting:
The extent to which a policy reform is consonant with the agency's mission.- The state of the agency's budget, whether it is running a deep deficit or is balanced- The amount of interest that specific agency funders are likely to have in a specific issue or problem.- The viewpoints of the key agency officials, such as the director, top administrator, or members of the board of directors, and the directors of important agency programs, as surmised from their position in previous years on similar issues.
The viewpoints of agency officials or staff who are likely to be most impacted by a reform or issue
The likely effects of a specific reform on an agency's clientele
Community settings:
The viewpoints of key community leaders
Local public opinion
The perspectives of the local media
CAN DIRECT-SERVICE STAFF HELP BUILD AGENDAS?
They can begin working with their agencies and agency networks, by locating unaddressed or poorly addressed community needs.
They can read professional literature and find evidence-based practice that could be - but are not - implemented in specific settings, drawing this to the attention of other staff members and executives.
They can join coalitions and advocacy groups that already exist in the community and lend them volunteer and other support.
They gain credibility from their direct observations of persons and communities that their agency/program seeks to serve.
They can search for policy entrepreneurs who can place a specific issue on their agency's or a legislature's agenda, or on the agenda of a city council, school board, commission or country board of supervisors.
DEVELOPING LINKS WITH ADVOCACY GROUPS:
Policy advocates who wish to build agendas in the broader community, but who do not know how to get started, should consider connecting with an established advocacy group.
They try to shape public officials' agendas by pressuring them to consider solutions or problems, presenting research that underlines the importance of addressing specific social needs, and publicising stories in the mass media that dramatise certain issues.
SKILLS NEEDED IN AGENDA BUILDING:
1. Political Skills -
to analyse and engage in the political stream
2. Analytic Skills -
to develop and use data in the problem and solution streams
3. Interactional Skills -
to help problems and solutions reach policy deliberations in agency and legislative settings, persuade people to consider specific problems and solutions, participate in committees and task forces, and organise coalitions.
4. Value-clarifying Skills -
To decide whether to invest energy in promoting an issue in the first place and to decide how to frame it.