Welcome back. In this section we're going to be talking about the connected stakeholder model. This is one way of thinking about why certain kinds of advocacy efforts are more effective than others. As a reminder, in this course, we're going to focus on four strategies in particular; using the courts, communicating across platforms, connecting to power, and working locally. The connected stakeholder model emerges from other forms of scholarship that are talking about policy making. One of the more popular forms of policy making and efficacy scholarship are pluralist forms of understanding how policy is made. When we think about pluralist models, the idea is usually that policy is made when you gather stakeholders together. The idea of a stakeholder is somebody who has a particular stake that they fight for. They take their stake and they stick it in the ground and they fight for their stake. You can think about a environmentalist who's fighting for the environmental cause or a abortion rights activist who's fighting for abortion rights or women's rights activists fighting for women's rights or a corporate actor that's fighting for lower corporate taxes or whatever the cause is. These are particular stakeholders that have maybe a series of things that they're interested but they prioritize those things. They have one issue that they think is really important. They stick that stake down and they fight for their issue. In these kinds of models, when you think about the way the policy making works, you think about different stake holders who are gathered together in one room and they fight for their priorities, often they will align themselves such that, like the image on the right, there are two teams and you have the team of your friends and they fight against the team that opposes you. In the environmental issue area, you could think about this as the pro-environmental team versus the anti-environmental team. In these cases, the advocate has a very clear goal that they're looking for. In the policy-making process, the two sides fight against each other and you end up with a winner in the end. Somebody wins their policy goals and you end up with a policy that favors one side over the other. The process of advocacy is one in which you're trying to get your team to win. You're trying to get your policy ideas forward and you're fighting for your team to get their ideas moving forward. This idea, I've got the picture of a rugby match here, because you've got these two sides and they're pushing, they're shoving, and they're trying to get their side over the line so that they can get their preferred outcomes. Let's say you are not one of the policymakers in the room, when you are an advocate in these models, you are connected to one or more of the policymakers in the room, but you're generally connected only to the people that think like you do or have a belief system that is like yours or have a same kind of goals that you want. Number of different policy making models and advocacy models come off of these pluralist ideas in which good policy emerges out of a contentious process in which these competing actors fight for their outcome. In the end, because everybody gets something and nobody squashes anybody else, you can end up with good policy because everybody's voice as the multiple stakeholders are all heard, and you end up with a policy that emerges out of this process that recognizes the core main interests of most of the people there. The connected stakeholder model has a very different idea of how policy making works. In the pluralist models, a single stakeholder has a single cause that they are fighting for, so they have their one stake. In the connected stakeholder model, the people in the room, the policymakers, and in fact the stakeholders themselves do not necessarily have one cause or one stake that they are advocating for. Rather they're actually connected to lots of different advocates or lots of different kinds of stakeholders. For example, in my research in East Asia on environmental policy, it was quite common to encounter somebody who was, for example, a professor at a well-known university. This could be conceived as a neutral technical expert on whatever policy area they're in. But that professor is not just a technical expert. That Professor was frequently also serving a role on the board of directors of an NGO that was related to the issue area that they might be an expert in. For example, if you're a chemist and you are an expert on soil contamination, you might be asked to serve on government panels in an advisory capacity to try to set the levels of soil contamination that are going to be an allowed by a particular chemical. But since you also serve on the board of directors of a environmental NGO, you would not only know your technical information about the soil contamination levels but you would also have an interest in pro-environmental action. That connection between an academic having a technical expertise and also a interest in a pro-environmental outcome could be captured by the pluralist models. However, in the cases and the people that I interviewed for my project, a lot of those people did not just have one hat that they were wearing, or even in this case two hats that they were wearing. Often they were connected to many more people and roles such that it made it very difficult to decide exactly which stake they were fighting for. For example, if you had this professor who was a chemist, who was a soil contamination specialist and also served on the board of directors of an NGO, that very same person might also be a major shareholder or founder of an NGO or a for-profit company that did soil contamination remediation. This person would be not just an academic and not just part of the NGO sector, but also a business owner and have a perspective of a business person in any policy discussions about soil contamination. They may also have other roles in the government on advisory capacities or be connected in other ways through a spouse or a close friend or a roommate to other actors in the private or the non-profit spheres. The connected stakeholder model does not assume that the policymakers that are around the table are only representing a single interest, and that the stakeholders are imagined to have multiple interests rather than just one. Furthermore, they don't just ally with people that believe the same kinds of things that they do or that have the same single goal that they do. For example, in the pluralist models we had the team reference where you join a team and you're fighting in a contentious way against the other team. In the connected stakeholder model, you have multiple interests and you're connected to a lot of other people in the policy making process. Not just people who might share your same interest on one of your issues, but they might be people that you're connected to because you went to college with them, or because you were going to the same church as they do, or because you went to elementary school with them, or because you are neighbors, or because your kids are in school together. Any of these social connections or other ways in which you might be connected to somebody helps allow you to network with them, talk with them about their perspectives, and allows the people, the advocates as well as the policy-makers to have a broader perspective and a more diverse perspective when they approach policy making. Therefore, policy making becomes less of a contentious battle between one side and another side and rather a collaborative process in which lots of different people are working together to try to build a good outcome that serves the public good or at least the good of all the people that are connected to all the networks of everybody that's in the process. What this means is the idea of advocacy is not just one in which you're trying to get your team to win it's preferred policy outcome, but rather it's something where you're trying to influence the networks that policymakers are connected to. In particular, you're trying to influence the size, meaning how many connections does these networks have, and you are also trying to influence the diversity of the networks because in the connected stakeholder model, networks that are larger and more diverse will generate better policy outcomes.
