Globalizing Issues: How Claims, Frames, and Problems Cross Borders [1st ed.] 9783030520434, 9783030520441

This book is an invitation to question conventional and often misleading visions of globalization. No problem is global

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Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxv
Introduction: An Invitation to Explore the Processes, Puzzles and Ecosystems of Issues’ and Problems’ Globalization (Erik Neveu, Muriel Surdez)....Pages 1-24
Front Matter ....Pages 25-25
The Forgotten Guest: International Relations and the Globalization of Social Problems (Elitza Katzarova, Erik Neveu)....Pages 27-47
Hepatitis B, a Global Disease? On Some Paradoxes of the Construction of Global Health Problems (Maëlle de Seze)....Pages 49-71
Issue Competition in a Globalized World: The Causes of Cross-National Similarities and Differences in the Issue Content of Party Politics (Christoffer Green-Pedersen)....Pages 73-94
Field Theory and the Foundations of Agenda Setting and Social Constructionism Models: Explaining Media Influence on French Mad Cow Disease Policy (Jérémie Nollet)....Pages 95-114
Front Matter ....Pages 115-115
“Accidents Without Borders”? The Renationalization of a Global Problem in the French Media (Valerie Arnhold)....Pages 117-136
Same Topics with Different Meanings? Social Networks and the Trans-Nationalization of Issues and Frames in European Public Policy Agendas (Franca Roncarolo, Sara Bentivegna)....Pages 137-162
Claims-Making and Transnational Spaces: Contesting the Scope of Climate Change Discourse on Twitter (Timothy Neff)....Pages 163-183
Front Matter ....Pages 185-185
Rationalization, Privatization, Invisibilization? On Some Hidden Dimensions of the Transnationalization of Occupational Health and Traffic Safety Policies (Stève Bernardin, Emmanuel Henry)....Pages 187-209
From Global Problem Framing to Local Policy Implementation: Swiss Bureaucrats and the “Antibiotic Resistance” Issue (Muriel Surdez)....Pages 211-230
When International Indicators Disrupt Party Competition: How Standardized School Tests and Preferences Affect Parties’ Issue Emphasis (Thomas Artmann Kristensen)....Pages 231-253
From the National to the European and Back: A Structural Reading of the Circulation of a Policy Frame Across Borders (Matthieu Ansaloni)....Pages 255-276
Global by Nature? Three Dynamics in the Making of “Global Climate Change” (Stefan C. Aykut)....Pages 277-299
How Do European Lobbyists Frame Global Environmental Problems? A Case Study of the Biofuels Lobbying Campaign Through the Lens of a Major Agroindustry (Armèle Cloteau)....Pages 301-319
Media, the Public Sphere, and the Globalization of Social Problems (Daniel C. Hallin)....Pages 321-335
Back Matter ....Pages 337-357
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Globalizing Issues How Claims, Frames, and Problems Cross Borders Edited by Erik Neveu · Muriel Surdez

Globalizing Issues

Erik Neveu · Muriel Surdez Editors

Globalizing Issues How Claims, Frames, and Problems Cross Borders

Editors Erik Neveu Sciences Po Rennes, France

Muriel Surdez University of Fribourg Fribourg, Switzerland

ISBN 978-3-030-52043-4 ISBN 978-3-030-52044-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In times of climate warming, coronavirus pandemic and increasing and devastating inequalities we dedicate this book to all those who work to coordinate their efforts for a world where the future generations would experiment happier lives. Happier lives on a planet where biodiversity and the environment would be protected, happier lives in a world where, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau principle: “No citizen would be opulent enough to buy another citizen, and none poor enough to be forced to sold him/herself.”

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the participants in the ECPR Workshop in Nottingham who gave birth to this book. Our gratitude also goes to the University of Fribourg and to the Swiss National Science Foundation for their generous financial support that allowed us to organize a complementary workshop at the University of Fribourg. A special thanks to Alice Breathe who improve substantially several chapters with her corrections. The final version of the manuscript also benefited from the contribution of Lorène Piquerez.

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Contents

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Introduction: An Invitation to Explore the Processes, Puzzles and Ecosystems of Issues’ and Problems’ Globalization Erik Neveu and Muriel Surdez The Making of Global Problems Interdependency Chains and the Three Flows The Global Problems Ecosystem: The Map of Actors and Complex Interplay of Scales From a Scientific No Man’s Land Toward a “Seamless” Theoretical Frame The Social Problem Construction: From a National to a Comparative Framework The Development of the Agenda Setting Approach Within and Beyond Policy Process Studies Inviting to Uphill Battles for Interdisciplinary Connections References

Part I

2

1 4 6 8 13 13 16 18 21

Globalization of Issues and Problems: Frameworks Revisited

The Forgotten Guest: International Relations and the Globalization of Social Problems Elitza Katzarova and Erik Neveu

27 ix

x

CONTENTS

Definition: What Makes a Social Problem “Global”? Agency: Who Makes a Global Problem? Venues: Where Are Global Problems Made? The Weight of International Organizations Reconnecting Research Fields Diffusion: How Do Global Problems Spread? Conclusion References 3

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Hepatitis B, a Global Disease? On Some Paradoxes of the Construction of Global Health Problems Maëlle de Seze Hepatitis B: A Major Health Issue Not Constructed as a Global Health Problem Hepatitis B in the Prehistorian Age of Global Health: An Acknowledged Health Issue Main Reasons for the Fall of Scientists’ Attention to Hepatitis B in the 1990s and 2000s Characteristics of the Issue That Hindered Its Construction as a Global Health Problem Viral Hepatitis: A Multidimensional “HIV-Framed” Global Problem “Viral Hepatitis”: An Emerging Global Problem Since 2010, that Includes Hepatitis B Access to Hepatitis C Treatment: The Perfect Opportunity for Members of the Global Health Network on HIV to Claim Ownership of the New Global Problem Influence of “HIV-Framing” on Scientists, Activists, and Health Policymakers References Issue Competition in a Globalized World: The Causes of Cross-National Similarities and Differences in the Issue Content of Party Politics Christoffer Green-Pedersen Policy Agenda Setting in Comparative Perspective Problem Indicators and Focusing Events Issue Characteristics

31 34 38 38 39 40 43 44

49

51 52 53 55 57 58

59 62 68

73 75 76 79

CONTENTS

Electoral Appeals Coalition Incentives Similar or Different Party Agendas? How Have Party Agendas in Western Europe Developed? Agenda Setting in a Globalized World References 5

Field Theory and the Foundations of Agenda Setting and Social Constructionism Models: Explaining Media Influence on French Mad Cow Disease Policy Jérémie Nollet Social World Theories Without Social Agents Agenda Setting’s Implicit Theory of Action Social Problems’ Implicit Theory of Action Explaining the Effects of Agenda Setting and Social Construction Through Field Theory Agenda Setting and Framing as Field Effects Agenda and Framing Effects as a Result of the Relationships Between Fields Case Study: The Mad Cow Crisis in France A Field Theory of the “Mad Cow” Problem: Methodology Agenda Setting and Framing the “Mad Cow” Problem in March 1996 A Different Framing Dynamic in November 2000 Conclusion: A Non-deterministic Theory of Media Influence on Policymaking References

Part II

6

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80 82 83 84 89 91

95 96 97 98 100 100 101 102 103 105 109 110 112

Mapping the Actors and the Social Logics of Issues’ Globalization

“Accidents Without Borders”? The Renationalization of a Global Problem in the French Media Valerie Arnhold Methodology and Analytical Framework Comparing the French Media Coverage of Chernobyl and Fukushima: From a Global to a National Issue?

117 119 121

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CONTENTS

From International Politics and East–West Relations to French and Japanese Safety and Economic Concerns From European and Cross-Border Conflict After Chernobyl to a Common Response to Fukushima The Disappearance of Cross-Border Conflict and the Role of Germany in France Discussion: The Role of International Cooperation on Claims-Making and the Media Treatment of Nuclear Accidents in France Conclusion References 7

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Same Topics with Different Meanings? Social Networks and the Trans-Nationalization of Issues and Frames in European Public Policy Agendas Franca Roncarolo and Sara Bentivegna Introduction Construction and Circulation of the Problems in (Partially) Shared Discursive Spaces The European Public Sphere as a Prototypical Transnational Discursive Arena Transnationalization, Intermedia Agenda-Setting and Digital Platforms in the New Hybrid Media System From Issues to Frames: The Contents of Public Discourse Between National Agenda and International Implications: The Brexit Referendum A National Political Issue Reinterpreted on the International Political Stage: The Italian Constitutional Reform Referendum of 2016 Research Questions and Hypotheses Data and Methods One Issue, Multiple Frames Conclusions References Claims-Making and Transnational Spaces: Contesting the Scope of Climate Change Discourse on Twitter Timothy Neff

122 124 126

128 130 135

137 137 139 139 140 142 144

146 147 148 149 156 158

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CONTENTS

Climate Change: A Global Problem Discussed in Transnational Spaces Methodology Findings Topics Hashtag Dynamism Discursive Diversity Conclusions References

Part III

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164 167 169 169 172 175 177 180

Arenas and Venues: Bringing Scales, Frames and Temporalities Back In

Rationalization, Privatization, Invisibilization? On Some Hidden Dimensions of the Transnationalization of Occupational Health and Traffic Safety Policies Stève Bernardin and Emmanuel Henry From Transnationalization to Invisibilization: A Call for a Sociohistorical Analysis of Public Problems Before Politics and Business: The Academic Genesis of Transnational Problems From Gentlemen Drivers to State Engineers: Toward a Science of Traffic Safety International Congresses and Commissions: Limit Values Outside of Workplaces When Institutionalization Rhymes with Privatization: A Sociological Viewpoint on International Harmonization Traffic Safety at the United Nations: Auto Makers and Their Experts on the Move Occupational Health and the European Union: Ensuring Safety for Manufacturers and Employers Deny or Divide: The Two Faces of Concealment and Invisibilization of Social Problems When Social Issues Disappear: Occupational Health as a One-Way Policy When Social Issues Reappear: Traffic Safety as a Multiple-Choices Policy References

187

188 191 191 192 194 194 196 199 200 202 206

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CONTENTS

10

From Global Problem Framing to Local Policy Implementation: Swiss Bureaucrats and the “Antibiotic Resistance” Issue Muriel Surdez Reincorporating State Professional-Bureaucrats into the Making of Social Problems How the Administrative Framing of a Global Problem Challenged Swiss Bureaucrats Beneath the Surface of National Plans Antibiotic Resistance Reveals the Balance of Power Between Federal and Cantonal Administrative Units Inter-Professional Collaboration at Cantonal Level: Divergent Priorities and Responsibilities Cantonal Veterinarians: Involved, but Cautious How Do Chemical Engineers Distance Themselves from the Problem? Conclusion References

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When International Indicators Disrupt Party Competition: How Standardized School Tests and Preferences Affect Parties’ Issue Emphasis Thomas Artmann Kristensen Indicators and Party Competition PISA as an Indicator of Primary and Secondary School Problems When an Indicator Disrupts Party Competition Research Design, Data, and Effects The Independent Variables Estimation Strategy The PISA Effect on Party Attention to Education Conclusion References From the National to the European and Back: A Structural Reading of the Circulation of a Policy Frame Across Borders Matthieu Ansaloni

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212 215 216 217 220 220 222 224 228

231 234 235 236 240 241 242 243 249 251

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CONTENTS

Introduction The Origins of the Vision in Terms of Public Good A Detour by Brussels A Reversal of National Hierarchies Conclusion References 13

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Global by Nature? Three Dynamics in the Making of “Global Climate Change” Stefan C. Aykut Introduction Spatial Scale: A Problem of Planetary Proportions Weather Prediction, Climatology, and the Development of General Circulation Models Building a Transnational Knowledge Infrastructure Forging Epistemic Communities of Climate Experts Geopolitical Reach: A Problem of International Cooperation Constituting Global Governance as a Solution: Globalization, the Nation State, and the Logic of Collective Action Putting Theory into Practice: Climate Change as a “Common Concern of Mankind” From Rio to Copenhagen: The Rise and Fall of the Multilateral Approach Thematic Scope: A Problem of Coordination Across Societal Spheres and Policy Domains The Power of Attraction of Climate Summits Globalizing the Climate, Climatizing the World The New Logic of Climate Governance: “Facilitating” Public and Private Climate Action References How Do European Lobbyists Frame Global Environmental Problems? A Case Study of the Biofuels Lobbying Campaign Through the Lens of a Major Agroindustry Armèle Cloteau

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255 259 263 267 270 274

277 277 279 280 281 282 284

284 285 287 288 289 290 291 295

301

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CONTENTS

Building an Interest in Response to Legislation that Weakens the Company’s Production Model A Company Left Out of the Initial Framing of the Biofuel Problem Using Recognized Problems and International Reports to Persuade the Company From an Economic Argument to an Environmental One: Countering EU Regulators on Their Own Ground A Pioneer Company Acting to Preserve Low-Cost Vegetable Oils The Social Shift of the Company’s Interest: “Something Positive to Oppose to the [EU] Commission” When an Agro-Industrial Group Became an Ally of the Environment Conclusion References 15

Media, the Public Sphere, and the Globalization of Social Problems Daniel C. Hallin Transnationalizing the Public Sphere? Globalized Media Institutions? Limitations of Media Transnationalization Transnational Cooperative Journalism and Global Media Events Conclusion References

303 304 305 308 308 310 312 315 318

321 323 326 327 329 332 333

Author Index

337

Index

349

Notes on Contributors

Matthieu Ansaloni currently carries out his research at the French National Agronomic Research institute (INRAE), France. Focusing on public policies, his empirical work aims at analyzing the (re)production of segment(s) of the economic field. He is currently writing a book (with Andy Smith) which aims at elucidating the transformation of the French agricultural field, internally (the continuing process of economic capital accumulation) and externally (the decline of the agricultural field within the economic field). Valerie Arnhold is a Ph.D. student at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations in Paris and a contract researcher in the “Nuclear Knowledges” project at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris, France. Her Ph.D. dissertation proposes a sociology of nuclear accidents and their government in France, in Germany and on the European and international level. Stefan C. Aykut is Junior Professor of Sociology at Universität Hamburg and director of the Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS), Germany. His research examines the social and political dimensions of the global environmental crisis. Topics include global climate governance, energy transitions, and the use of forecasts and simulations in policymaking. He recently published Globalising the climate. COP21 and the ‘climatisation’ of global debates (Routledge, 2017) and Climatiser le monde (Quae, 2020).

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sara Bentivegna, Ph.D. is full Professor of Digital Media and Political Communication at the “Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy. Her main research interests lie in the field of political communication, with a specific focus on digital politics. Her current research projects concern multiple agendas at a time of disrupted public spheres. She has published numerous articles in national and international journals including the European Journal of Communication, Journalism, Journalism studies, Contemporary Italian Politics. Stève Bernardin is an associate professor of sociology at the Université Gustave Eiffel (UGE-LATTS), France. His current research examines the concept of ownership of public problems from a sociohistorical perspective, with particular focus on traffic safety and the development of autonomous vehicles. He also works on an edited book on the sociological legacy of the late Joseph Gusfield. He recently published “Controversies or Public Problems? Open questions and research proposals,” European Association for the Study of Science and Technology-EASST Review, 38 (1), 2019. Armèle Cloteau is a researcher in political sociology Laboratoire IRISSO at the University Paris-Dauphine, PSL University, France. Her work focuses on the participation of multinational companies in food and environment policies at the European Union level and at the national level in France. Combining various qualitative methods (interviews, ethnography) with research in public and private archives, she analyzes the daily work of interest representatives and their relationships with regulators. She recently published (with M. Mourad) an article on food waste policies in Gouvernement et Action publique. Maëlle de Seze wrote her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Sheffield, School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR), UK and at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP, UMR 8209), France. She is studying the construction of global health policies between the transnational and the national level. Her Ph.D. focused on a global problem (viral hepatitis) that emerged at WHO in 2010, and the public health policies to address this problem in Senegal and The Gambia. She also has a background in public health and epidemiology and has worked on various global health topics such as liver cancer, HIV and coinfection between HIV and tuberculosis or viral hepatitis.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xix

Christoffer Green-Pedersen is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on party competition, agendasetting, and public policy in comparative perspective. He is one of the founders of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) and the author of “The Reshaping of West European Party Politics,” Oxford University Press 2019. Daniel C. Hallin is Distinguished Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, USA. His books include The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (1986), We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere (1994), Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (2004), and Making Health Public: How News is Remaking Media, Medicine and Contemporary Life. Emmanuel Henry is Professor of Sociology at the Université ParisDauphine, PSL University, France. He carries out a sociology of public policies that seeks to highlight their contribution to the persistence of social inequalities. His work focuses on the links between scientific knowledge (and ignorance), expertise, and public policy in the field of public health (mostly regarding occupational and environmental health). He recently published Ignorance scientifique et inaction publique. Les politiques de santé au travail, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2017. Elitza Katzarova holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and Political Science from the School of International Studies at the University of Trento, Italy. Her main research interest is in the field of anticorruption. She has carried out research on the OECD and UN anticorruption efforts at the OECD archives in Paris and the UN archives in New York. Her book “The Social Construction of Global Corruption: From Utopia to Neoliberalism” was published by Palgrave (2018). She has worked and given lectures at universities in Germany, Austria, Italy, Bulgaria, and Portugal. Thomas Artmann Kristensen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on international indicators, party competition, political agenda-setting, and the media. His thesis explores how the interplay of information from indicators and the strategic or ideological preferences of political parties

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shape the issues that are on top of the political agenda, using quantitative methods and data that covers multiple Western European countries, political issues, and years. Timothy Neff earned his Ph.D. in New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and is a 2019–2020 Fellow at the Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, USA. His research focuses on news and social media discourse about climate change and on the relationship between public service journalism and different forms of media ownership. He has published articles in The International Journal of Press/Politics, International Journal of Communication, and Environmental Communication. Erik Neveu is Emeritus Professor of Political Sciences in the research team ARENES/CNRS, University of Rennes, France. He has developed research on journalism and the public sphere; social movements and cultural studies. His current research targets the construction of public problems and especially how do they move (or not) over borders. Most recent publication: Activists Forever? Long term consequences of political commitment. With Olivier Fillieule (Eds), Cambridge University press, 2019. Jérémie Nollet is an associate professor in political science at Sciences Po Toulouse, France. His research focuses on the relation between the media and political activities: public policies, electoral campaign, and social movements. After studying the media coverage of the mad cow crisis in France and its effects on public policies, he took part to a collective research on the mobilizations against the closure of a factory in a small rural town. He currently studies the mediatization of the Yellow Vest Movement in France. Franca Roncarolo is full Professor of Political Science at the University of Turin, Italy, where she teaches public communication. She has carried out research on the media’s role in the policymaking process; political communication and election campaigns; styles of political leadership; and forms of mediatization. She is the author of several articles in international journals, and she has contributed to edited books on political communication published by Palgrave, Routledge and Cambridge University Press.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Muriel Surdez is Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research interest is in sociology of professions and of public policies. She led several research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation: among the more recent, one studies the reforms of veterinary public health and food safety (“Cooperation and competition between professional bureaucrats. The case of Food safety reforms in Switzerland”); the second explores how the platform economy transforms the professions in the hospitality sector. She recently published a paper on engineer’s political sozialisation at work (Revue française de science politique, 2019, 3).

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 8.1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

8.2 8.3 8.4 11.1 11.2

Fig. 11.3

Party attention to macro-economic issues 1980–2015 Party attention to the environment 1980–2015 Attention to health care in seven countries 1980–2015 Party system attention to crime and justice in seven countries 1980–2015 Change in the number of tweets devoted to the Italian constitutional referendum, in the Italian and English Twitterspheres, 29 November–5 December 2016 Topic distribution of retweets by Twitter users from fields of civil society and politics (percentages) Top ten communities on 30 November 2015 Top ten communities on 6 December 2015 Top ten communities on the final day of COP 21 PISA scores Attention to primary and secondary education by country (Note The vertical dashed lines mark the publication of PISA results) Marginal effect of PISA score on attention to primary and secondary education (Note Calculated based on model 4 in Table 11.1)

85 86 87 88

150 171 172 173 174 240

244

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 6.1 Table Table Table Table Table Table Table

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8.1 8.2

Table 11.1

National and transnational claims-makers Geographical areas mentioned in newspaper articles and TV segments about Chernobyl and Fukushima Links in the Italian- and English-language Tweets Topic solution in Italian Twittersphere Topic solution in English Twittersphere Topics and frames in Italian twittersphere Topics and frames in English Twittersphere Topic rankings in #COP21 communities Central Twitter account fields, cross-tabulated by topics in retweets circulating in the communities centered on those accounts Estimating parties’ level of attention to primary and secondary education

34 121 151 152 153 154 155 170

171 245

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: An Invitation to Explore the Processes, Puzzles and Ecosystems of Issues’ and Problems’ Globalization Erik Neveu and Muriel Surdez

The starting point for this book was a workshop entitled “Transnationalization of problems and agendas: Theoretical and empirical challenges” that took place in Nottingham during the 2017 Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research.1 If the aim of the workshop was a better understanding of transnationalization processes, its driver was dissatisfaction with two specific aspects of research in this area. The ambition for this book is to transform dissatisfaction into fruitful theoretical and empirical statements. The first source of dissatisfaction was academia’s indiscriminate use of the words “global” and “globalization” in relation to issues or problems, and the major risk of oversimplification this entails. The globalization

E. Neveu (B) Sciences Po, Rennes, France e-mail: [email protected] M. Surdez University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_1

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category becomes largely meaningless when it is taken for granted. The word “globaloney” has even been coined to suggest the emptiness of many of its uses, as if combining the adjective “global” with any kind of social fact magically produces a deeper understanding and testifies to the theoretical modernity of its user. In the field of social problems studies, the adjunction of the term “global” to certain issues since the 1990s indicates a growing attention to issues considered to have considerable impacts on billions of people, beyond borders (Chirico, 2018; Glynn, Hohm, & Stewart, 1996; Mazur, 2007; Seitz & Hite, 1991/2012; Snarr & Snarr, 1998/2012). Concurrently, it demonstrates the increasing interdependency of countries in contemporary societies. From this perspective, a successful undergraduate textbook defines two types of global issues: First, there are those issues that are transnational ones—that is, they cross political boundaries (country borders). These issues affect individuals in more than one country. A clear example is air pollution produced by a factory in the United States and blown into Canada. Second, there are problems and issues that do not necessarily cross borders but affect a large number of individuals throughout the world. Ethnic rivalries and human right violations, for example, may occur within a single country but have a far wider impact. (Snarr & Snarr, 1998/2012, p. 2)

While this type of definition points to a crucial reappraisal in social sciences, namely the fact that problems long studied within national social systems deserve a broader approach,2 it only tells part of the story. Authors giving useful depictions of “the most important environmental, economic, social, and political concerns of modern life” (Seitz & Hite, 1991/2012, cover) or “examining major problems around the world” (Mazur, 2007, cover) compile long lists of “global issues,” from weapons proliferation to the regulation of the atmospheric commons.3 In doing so, they attempt to establish an objective hierarchy of problems, overlooking the struggles around the recognition of some issues and leaving other issues out altogether, regardless of how critical they may be for some social actors. Textbooks are regularly re-edited to include additional chapters about “new” (though not necessarily more important or more global) problems and the choice of issues usually appears reasonable and coherent. Why? It is worth noting that the issues labeled as global—islamophobia, the instability and fluidity of conjugality, or animal abuse and well-being, for example—are selected because they have been

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3

socially defined as important, debated in TV studios or at political rallies, and supported and challenged by spokespersons. In short, they have already been transformed from “issues” into “social problems.” Meanwhile, other issues may have an enormous impact on particular groups or multiple countries and yet remain under the radar, due to a lack of voices expressing them. To go back to the first example in the definition quoted above, the effects of industrial smoke crossing borders will only be discussed if they are visible enough to be detected, if their negative impacts on public health are known, if some interpretive categories such as “pollution” or “industrial hazard” are available, and if claims-makers challenge the situation. The existence of an “issue” is never enough in itself. Issues do not speak. Claims-makers do. Thus, our claim is that a political sociology of the “globalization” of problems must explore the processes by which, among the enormous variety of issues that are not unique to one country, some, and only some, trigger attention, discussion, and policy action.4 Global issues are not global in essence, waiting to be identified by clever academics. They are the products of networks of interdependencies, of communication systems. They gain the status of “problems” in the media and public opinion through the cross-border actions of claims-makers. This critical stance is not specific to global issues. It was already at the heart of the constructivist approach to social problems as it distanced itself from a reified perspective of problems. However, it would seem that this insight got lost somewhere along the way to globalization. The second source of dissatisfaction behind our collective work was the strange absence of synergy between “the social construction of public problems” paradigm institutionalized by Gusfield (1963) and Spector and Kitsuse (1977) on the one hand, and the powerful agenda setting tradition deriving from the seminal research by Cobb and Elder (1972) and McComb and Shaw (1972) on the other. Each approach has contributed rich case studies and theoretical developments that illuminate different aspects of the globalization of problems. The agenda setting approach has developed impressive international comparisons (Princen, 2009) and, more recently, has examined the influence of national agendas on each other, questions that are underdeveloped in the social construction approach. It has produced solid materials for understanding the interdependencies between media agendas, opinions, and policies. Conversely, social constructionists have paid much more attention to the actions, peculiarities, and trajectories of claims-makers, as well as to the process

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of news production, while the proponents of agenda setting focus on the journalistic output. If it is too much to describe these two research communities as being in conflict or in a state of mutual ignorance, their relationship does bring to mind a famous French song from the 1960s: “Je t’aime…moi non plus” (I love you…neither do I). We want to explore the possible convergences and bridges between the social construction and agenda setting approaches,5 as well as with other scholarly traditions within political and social sciences that deal with globalization issues, such as international relations, policy transfer studies, global health studies, media studies, sociology of science, and expertise. This book can therefore also be considered an attempt to supply a provisional synthesis of poorly connected research fields studying the multifaceted processes that go into globalizing problems, agendas, and policies.

The Making of Global Problems This book considers that issues are not global simply by virtue of existing in several countries, in a tightly interconnected world, but as a result of processes. It engages with three related research questions. Firstly, it tries to clarify the category of “global problems” to enable an academically sound exploration of the international dimension of public problems. What can be defined sociologically as a “global problem”? If we start from the position that issues are not global per se, that they cannot cross borders or impact people in more than one country in and of themselves, the answer to this question is not straightforward. In line with the constructivist approach, we would argue that “global” is a putative rather than an objective condition, even though some problems in certain circumstances are more likely to become global than others. Based on the agenda setting approach, we also assume that global issues have been framed as such and put on the agenda of global or international organizations. If problems appear to be more global nowadays, historians and sociologists can remind us that attempts to handle social problems and to build social policies at an international scale characterize some periods (the second half of the nineteenth century, from 1945 onward) and institutions (such as the ILO or the WHO). The effort to define “global problems” thus consists less in explaining how they appeared out of the blue fifty years ago than in making sense of how some kinds of issues came to be considered to require management across national borders, giving birth to a new cognitive category of “global problems.” Inspired

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by a social history of ideas, we argue that this interpretive tool finds its roots in major social changes. Secondly, this volume aims to map the social actors, institutions, processes, and trajectories that give problems global prominence. Here the main questions are: how are issues debated across borders? How do they find institutional relays, supports, and “translations”? When focusing on globalizing processes, it is important to explore whether the balance of power and the relationships between actors (international organizations, international groups of experts, states, NGOs, INGOs, social movements, interest groups, and firms) are changing. Do states, with their different components—ministries, parliaments, professional bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies (Goaschino, 2019)—, still play a central role within or alongside international organizations? What is the influence of social movement, lobbies, NGOs, and IGOs? Globalization processes may blur the boundaries between actors, reshaping organizations, and producing surprising coalitions and new repertoires (such as certification procedures) for treating problems. Among other structural changes, the growing professionalization of social movements and their increasingly scientific treatment of problems are invitations to revisit the map of actors, the changing lines of their alliances, their forms of action and bargaining, in a globalized space where the problems and their solutions are defined. Thirdly, exploring the trajectories of global issues also involves addressing “how the multi-leveled dimension of globalization works.” The agenda setting approach considers various agendas and venues in order to explore how a global problem is promoted, treated, or ignored at the international, national, regional, or local scale. A global problem can of course be moved from one scale to another, even if it is not always possible to identify the countries or institutions influencing its movement. It is important to pay attention to the scales of the analysis (does it focus on hegemonic countries, transnational activist networks, or supranational organization such as the European Union or Mercosur, for example?), as well as to the complex game of scale changes played by various actors. Considering the symbolic and cognitive dimensions of problem definition, it is particularly important to grasp the circulation and translation of frames, considered not only as adaptations to cultural differences between exporting and importing territories (Best, 2001), but also as the dynamics of support building and allies enlistment (Latour, 1984). The media, intellectuals, and think tanks all have a role to play in the production of hegemonic or divergent visions of problems and solutions.

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Interdependency Chains and the Three Flows In his major work, The Civilizing Process (2000), Elias presented modern societies as places of growing interdependencies or “configurations” in which any move by one group or institution can create threats or opportunities for others. One of the characteristics of modern capitalism is the complexity and sheer size of these chains of interdependencies. Spreading further, connecting more actors, and drawing on more powerful resources, human action and its consequences have created situations that would easily be labeled as global problems. The production of goods and services combines contributions from several, often distant, countries. The constant restructuring of such chains of production also means that factories and jobs can be relocated. Both the exploitation of workers and children in Asian and South American sweatshops and the destruction of rainforests for timber or soya or oil palm plantations are consequences of these extended economic networks and have given rise to two major global public problems: fair working conditions in developing countries and the protection of rainforests (Bartley, 2003). Global warming under the influence of industries, deforestation, and motor traffic is a clear example of these complex interdependencies, creating situations labeled as global problems in a dialogic process of “climatization of the world and globalization of the climate” that Stephen Aykut explores in his contribution (see also Aykut, Foyer, & Morena, 2017). This book pays close attention not only to environmental issues, but also to health issues. New practices in industrial livestock farming boosted the development and spread of “mad cow disease” (Nollet, in this volume), the widespread use of antibiotics in veterinary (as well as in human) medicine has provoked the growing resistance of bacteria (Surdez, in this volume), and the concentration of poultry in vast farms gives new proportions to avian flu epidemics. Fast and frequent air travel and the flow of tourists across borders and continents accelerate the spread of epidemics, as this was very visible during the COVID 19 crisis in 2020. In a previous era, the surge in the number of cars engendered traffic safety as a transnational problem (Bernardin & Henry, in this volume). Interdependency chains are not merely economic. They also link states that adopt policies under the pressure of international organizations or through binding and imitating processes. One origin of this process can be found in colonization time with the transfer of social policy models between states (Moses & Daunton, 2014, special issue of The Journal of Global History).

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These interdependencies are the basis on which claim-makers develop the rhetoric of global problems or of foreign responsibility for the hard times faced by their fellow citizens. But they are not sufficient conditions. There are complementary social and political conditions that make a process of problem globalization possible. The whole scheme can be summarized as three flows (Neveu, 2017). The first flow is material, made up of material “things,” animals and viruses, goods and clouds, and humans, which are the “problem fodder.” Radioactive clouds or industrial pollution are blown from Chernobyl to Stuttgart; nuclear power plants located close to international borders threaten neighboring countries (Arnhold, in this volume). Soya or palm oil is transported and transformed into biofuel for cars with the intention of reducing carbon emissions in industrialized countries (Cloteau, in this volume). The flow can also be human. Migrants crowd into unsafe dinghies to cross the Mediterranean. Tourists fly back from far-flung countries, bringing with them antibiotic-resistant bacteria. As important as the first, a second flow is made up of problem and solution definers who tackle issues, give them political importance and resonance, and provide frames and tools for dealing with them. Reacting to accidents, nuclear safety experts meet at the regional or international level to define standards and to monitor compliance. Experts, scientists, and representatives from states, NGOs, and private companies meet at climate summits to debate the consequences of climate change and to define “appropriate” technical and political ways to handle the problem, including the setting of an “acceptable” temperature increase. Lobbyists from the agri-food industry ally with representatives from environmental NGOs to intervene in the drafting of legal texts supporting biofuel production. Activists for global social justice organize “world social forums,” through which they export patterns of problem definition and treatment, such as the shelters established by British feminists to protect battered women (Roggeband, 2007). Last but not least, a third flow is cognitive and symbolic. It is made up of narratives, images, and analytical categories that almost take on a life of their own. In 2015 the image of a Syrian boy’s dead body face down on a beach did more to highlight the tragedy of migrants than many official reports. Commented on by national and international media, pictures of fires in Australia or in the Amazon rainforest, and maps of radioactive clouds play a central role in defining the international agenda of

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issues and problems in the environmental field. Data, figures, and categories are generated, especially by international organizations (Katzarova & Neveu in this volume; Kristensen in this volume). This makes it possible to compare national situations and forms epistemic communities (Simonin, 2016, on the “sexworker” category disseminated by academics and activists). Problems’ entrepreneurs define what categories are able to structure a “reasonable” discussion, and what the right tools of action and evaluation are. This “package” corresponds to what policy researchers call policy frames. Developed in Brazilian cities, participatory budgets as tools for active citizenship have been imported to many west European cities (Burgos-Vigna, 2012) suggesting a topical case of solution’s travel, fixing some problems of local democracy. As Berten and Leisering (2017) have shown in their study of the poverty indicators developed by the IMF and the ILO, the very fact of defining indicators is a “mechanism of globalization” which soon produces “new constructions of social problems” (pp. 152, 158). Monitoring tools now produce an amazing abundance of data. Gita Steiner-Khamsi (2003) speaks of “the politics of league tables” to define the effects of rankings. When only a few French universities scraped a place in the “Shanghai ranking” of the world’s universities there was a flurry of public policies of which one of the funniest was the notion that merging under-resourced universities and institutions into giant groups would magically allow them to break into the top twenty. In this culture of figures and objectivation, social movements and interest groups have developed their own “watchdog” organizations and think tanks, from Transparency International to Reporters Without Borders, that collect data and produce rankings. The Global Problems Ecosystem: The Map of Actors and Complex Interplay of Scales Facts matter. Following Best’s invitation to a contextual constructivism (2008), there is no doubt that “objective” changes (the first flow described above) encourage new visions of social problems. Issues explicitly perceived as being linked to supranational chains of interdependencies, such as environmental problems, or rising inequalities, certainly reach the top of the agenda for public opinion and policy-makers more easily in many countries (Baumgartner, Breunig, & Grossman, 2019). But this book posits that “issues”—even those springing from natural or social facts, such as earthquakes, pollution, diseases, or the lower wages

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of female workers—need to be transformed into “problems” before they can draw attention. They have to be framed as transformative or anomalous and debated as such, as inviting “blame” or “claims” (Felstiner, Abel, & Sarat, 1980–1981). They have to be placed on the media, public, and political agendas. This process requires claims-makers. Global problems could thus be defined as social problems that have been taken up by claims-makers organizing or acting across national borders. These stakeholders develop and promote solutions to be applied transnationally, by transnational institutions, to face situations existing in more than one country. It is growing increasingly difficult to define and manage a problem within a single country, though this is not necessarily acknowledged by all the actors involved. The making of global problems can thus be linked to the nature of the claims (requiring supranational action), the identity of claims-makers (supranational coalitions), and the spatial dimension of the problem (treated at the international scale, by international institutions or boards). The case studies in this book explore the complex articulations between these three dimensions. The promoters of a new European agricultural policy are neither national nor transnational, but may move between these two scales (Ansaloni, in this volume), while national actors that dominate the international network are able to shape a problem by building alliances with European bureaucrats. Although several African countries considered hepatitis to be a critical problem, the disease attracted no attention outside the continent before research communities in the Global north took a scientific interest (De Seze, in this volume). Can a problem still be considered “global” if the claims-makers and the proposed policy solution are national? The answer, paradoxically, could be yes: far-right organizations network beyond borders, influencing anti-migrant policies at the European Parliament. To understand how global problems emerge, it is therefore necessary to focus on the ecosystem of institutions, repertoires, and resources that are available to (or out of the reach of) claims-makers beyond borders. After revisiting the major paradigms (social constructivism, agenda setting) and the need for new disciplinary connections in its first part, this book therefore goes on to analyze the social logic of the actors defining global problems in Part 2 and attempts to track how actors and frames change and circulate between venues and scales in Part 3. If nuclear accidents and nuclear safety would seem to be inherently global issues and traffic safety and occupational health might appear

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to be problems for national policies, two chapters in Part 2 tell far more intriguing stories about how these issues became global problems. Comparing the coverage of nuclear disasters in the French media, Arnhold shows that Chernobyl was not in fact initially perceived and framed as a global event, due to the slow release of information, but later gave rise to transnational conflicts and debates in a tense political context between communist and noncommunist governments. Twenty-five years later, Fukushima was covered quite differently: it was predominantly treated as a matter for France and Japan and the global dimension of the problem was erased. According to Arnhold, the creation of international regulators (nuclear safety agencies) led to more technical and economic assessments that paradoxically reduced the visibility of international stakes in the field of nuclear energy. Bernardin and Henry highlight how scientific experts turned traffic safety and occupational health into global problems from the begining of the twentieth century by building a scientific community to address them. The international organizations and bureaucrats that came later were therefore inclined to endorse the tools, standards, and definitions that engineers and researchers had already discussed. The globalization of these issues thus underwent a process of normalization, with little leeway for stakeholders to contest the process or to bring out new aspects of the problems. Internationalization and globalization do not necessarily broaden the debate or allow conflicting definitions to circulate more easily, quite the contrary. The two other chapters in Part 2 (Neff; Roncarolo & Bentivegna) shed light on another element of the ecosystem. The context in which claims-making organizations operate has been profoundly modified by the development of transnational media and communication networks that can broadcast ideas, messages, and campaigns more widely than ever before. The new mediascape is creating a global audience, albeit one “with a strong upper-class accent” (to borrow Schattschneider’s phrase) and that remains largely western. Beyond national identities, many members of resource-rich groups share the same news and news agenda. The new common sense is to “think globally” and to focus on “global” problems. Neff takes the example of Twitter as a global platform where claimmakers can comment on problems and events, such as global warming at the COP21. His quantitative analysis shows that this space was strongly divided into communities with differing perspectives: NGOs and activists tweeted to broaden the scope of the meeting to aspects of the problem being downplayed in negotiations, whereas political and economic actors

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focused on highlighting the success of the talks. Transnational media are also very important for actors involved in very specific national debates. Using Tweeter and press coverage, at both the Italian constitutional referendum of 2016 and Brexit, Roncarolo, and Bentivegna question how messages, frames, and debate issues escape beyond national boundaries. Is there something like a European public sphere? Is it a unified arena or a mosaic of national or class-defined spaces where discussing the “same” problem does not mean focusing on the “same” frames, sources, or discourses? Both these contributions show that the new social transnational media are not completely disconnected from the traditional media or from the balance of power between actors within established international organizations. By mapping the relationships of actors involved in the construction of global issues, we support the finding that the balance of power between a growing number and variety of transnational claims-makers is evolving (Dodson, 2015) and that repertoires of contention and policy-making are blurring. Think tanks are used by social movements and lobbies, NGOs, and IGOs. Interest groups are hijacking the tools of social movements as when, speaking in the name of an imagined European “civil society,” the glass producers’ federations invent a “friends of glass” movement supposed to express environment-savvy views on packaging (Laurens, 2015). Social movements are combining more and more expertise and monitoring with mass mobilization. Social movements and companies, foundations, and trade unions are forming surprising alliances (Cloteau, in this volume), inventing and transferring new regulations and solutions such as the growing use of “nudges” as policy tools (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009). Keck and Sikkink (1998) have revealed the importance of transnational advocacy networks connecting a great variety of organizations. They show that these networks have a long history, but they also suggest how “their number, size, professionalism, and the density and complexity of their international linkages have grown dramatically in the last three decades, so that only recently can we speak of transnational advocacy networks.” If activists are aware of the opportunities presented by a denser network of international institutions, regulations, and courts, so too are nondemocratic states and cynical businesses with vast resources. Mapping the actors involved in the globalization of problems requires going beyond a “Whig” vision of the transnational and not only focusing on “nice” claim-makers.

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Part 3 tackles the interplay of scales in globalizing processes. It is often claims-makers working at the national level or representing their country within international organizations who make a problem global. British nature conservationists shared their vision for agricultural policy with Brussels bureaucrats, for example (Ansaloni, in this volume). In the other direction, a problem defined and framed as global has to be reinterpreted nationally or locally. Swiss bureaucrats, not content with international “recommendations” for tackling antibiotic resistance, developed their own national plan (Surdez, in this volume). These two-way routes remain largely overlooked, as is the way in which, when problems move, their definitions change. Even more overlooked is the competition between private and public stakeholders at the international level. Global companies that wish to influence the definition of a problem on the international agenda may have to obtain support from other quarters, as shown by Cloteau’s contribution to corporate lobbying against European biofuel policies. These findings indicate that a problem does not cease being treated at other levels, for instance national level, once it has been constituted a “global” problem. This is very noticeable when different national agendas (those of parties or media) are compared on “global problems” such as environment, macroeconomics, or educational institutions. From this perspective, Green-Pedersen in this volume examines what are the possible drivers leading to a greater similarity between different parties’ agendas across national borders. Kristensen, meanwhile, compares how national political parties with different political orientations react to the introduction of the international PISA ranking, which breaks their proper definition of educational policy, a field long considered as highly domestic. The circulation between venues and scales can even go to the limits of doublespeaking as in the schizophrenic management of the Coronavirus crisis, where the general agreement on the “global” dimension of the pandemic combined with purely national—and often contradictory— managements of the crisis. Aykut’s chapter will supply another powerful illustration of these complex situations. Even among those agreeing on the need for immediate action against climate warming, stakeholders may think of the issue as a scientific object, an issue in search of collective action, a multidimensional issue of social change and thus value different arenas, solutions, and coalition building.

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The interplay of scales brings out constraints or leeway for social actors, the study of which calls for theoretical and empirical tools from diverse scholarly traditions.

From a Scientific No Man’s Land Toward a “Seamless” Theoretical Frame Improving the understanding of how global problems are produced is not easy. One obstacle, already mentioned in this chapter, is the persistent temptation to consider that problems are either intrinsically global or not. But it is equally important to challenge the fragmentation, surprising blind spots, and absence of articulations between disciplinary or specialized knowledge. The sociology of social problems and the agenda setting perspective within political studies share the idea that problems attract public attention as a result of selection and framing processes (Hassenteufel, 2010). It is hardly necessary to add that a significant part of these processes is developed in and by the media which—to use Gans’s famous phrase—“decide what’s news” (1979/2005), but also define how facts are transformed into narratives. The sociology of news-making is thus another piece of the disciplinary jigsaw puzzle. However, until recently these research fields developed quite separately. The same is true for complementary subdivisions of sociology and political science, such as international relations and policy transfer that contribute to the study of the dissemination of issues through international bodies and procedures. Our claim here is to offer some initial thoughts on these disconnections. We also want to emphasize that the analysis of global problems is at crossroads, hesitating whether to follow the path of comparison or diffusion. It is also wavering between the study of the content and evolution of frames, claims, or tools and the description of the stakeholders, involved in arenas and networks, wielding them. The Social Problem Construction: From a National to a Comparative Framework A common characteristic of many studies on the construction of social problems is their national framework, for the simple reason that this research tradition was institutionalized in the United States, with the creation of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1951) and its

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journal Social Problems (1953), and almost all its major scientific achievements were based on North American materials. As Best highlighted in the first reader dedicated—half a century later—to How Claims Spread (2001): Typically these constructionist researchers conducted case studies, each an account of how and why a particular problem came to national public attention […] National sources are the most visible, the most prestigious venues for social problem claims, and they are far more likely to be saved in library collections—and far more likely to be better indexed—than local and regional materials. (pp. 1–2)

Accordingly, until the 1980s, the issues of Social Problems gave access to a rich collection of US-based case studies, later to European ones, rarely to contributions following claims-makers and problem-framings across borders.6 This situation changed in the 2000s (Benson & Saguy, 2005), with a growing focus on comparative approaches to social problems such as sexual harassment (Saguy, 2003), obesity (Saguy, Gruys, & Gong, 2010), junk food consumption (Fantasia, 1995), and teenage pregnancy (Linders & Bogard, 2014).7 From a constructionist perspective, it is worth noting that comparative work is far from an easy task. Exploring a problem as a claims-making activity requires in-depth fieldwork in order to identify the configuration of claims-makers. The actors involved may be diverse, for example the professional groups (Linders, 1998). The media landscape (Benson & Saguy, 2005), as well as the legitimate rhetoric of claims (Saguy et al., 2010), the usual repertoire of collective action and, last but not least, the administrative routine or official categorizations may be very different (Linders & Bogard, 2014). Comparing a problem’s trajectories within different political contexts therefore opens a complex field of investigation sensitive to the international variations of social problems. It is still at an early stage. In addition, in most work on social problem construction, the globalization of claims-making activities, apprehended as a process of problem diffusion, is not central. Surprisingly, in the era of AIDS, mass migration, and generalized environmental pollution, the first constructivist research on the process of claims and problem transnationalization was dedicated to… Satanism (Richardson, Best, & Bromley, 1991). The real or imagined activities of Satanist groups had mobilized religious groups and was highly visible in the US media. The first research on the subject focused

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on the role of experts in extending the problem from the United States to neighboring Canada, as noted by Lippert (1990): American experts have been quoted in Canadian articles more often than Canadian experts have, which may help explain how Satanism can migrate to Canada from the US with or without the actual number of Satanists increasing. The effect of American television talk shows being beamed into Canada […] and the use of American experts in the Canadian media and at Canadian seminars is that the American problem becomes indistinguishable from the Canadian one. (p. 431)

A later study broadened the diffusion approach to other Commonwealth countries. Richardson comments that “the moral panic about ritual child abuse in the UK is nearly totally an American export” (1997, p. 73). In Australia and New Zealand, the zeal of the “American anti-Satanist ‘missionaries’,” supplying seminars to police forces and social workers, was the first explanation of the spread of the problem. One can agree with Best (2001) that “Satanism has been the social problem that triggered something that could be read, twenty years later, as a ‘diffusion’s turn’.” But it is worth adding that this ‘turn’ had not yet generated a huge flow of research, even if what it has generated has been valuable. Davis’ study (2002) of the translation, both linguistic and cultural, of the famous feminist Bible Our bodies, ourselves is a rare example exploring how ideas, knowledge, and claims must go through a process of cultural adaptation in order to spread. Several contributions in Parts 1 and 3 follow this line of research. They explore how international experts embedded in international organizations and relayed by professional bureaucrats disseminate scientific knowledge and standards that support a certain definition of a problem. Whether in the area of nuclear safety, traffic safety, biofuel policy, agricultural policy, or human and animal health, we observe how actors with specific resources (administrative, scientific, economic, symbolic) act, form alliances, and look at the most advantageous venues to implement their views.

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The Development of the Agenda Setting Approach Within and Beyond Policy Process Studies Likewise originating in the United States, the agenda setting approach, which aims to reconstruct long-term fluctuations in the attention given to issues, gradually adopted a more extensive and comparative perspective, as the social problem approach has done. Taking stock of this development, the recent and essential book by Baumgartner et al. (2019) explains how the project to compare diverse agendas (political, media) between countries—under the umbrella of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP)— was coupled with the creation of an international database coding issues over time.8 The comparative research seeks to study whether political attention evolves in similar directions even if the characteristics of political institutions differ. It also explores how the agenda of supranational or international institutions (such as those of the European Union) is connected with or disconnected from national agendas, how rankings produced by International organizations such as the PISA reports of the OECD are impacting national agendas and actors (Kristensen in this book). To compare agendas on a broad scale, the coding of issues is a central methodological aspect. To operationalize the database, issues are primarily coded by policy field and by subdomains (for example, environmental issues is declined in pollution, climate change, and so on) but not according to left-wing political positions because the same issue can be tackled over time by opposing political camps. According to the promoters of the ambitious CAP, these limits remain challenging but can be overcome, when studying categories of issues and topics in greater depth: So framing, like ideological position, is a topic dear to the hearts and concerns of many of the scholars who participate in (indeed, who designed) the CAP […], but one that is not systematically incorporated into the publicly available databases. As it requires close contextual knowledge, it needs to be added on, typically by a scholar or team with an interest in a particular question. For example, several scholars have looked at abortion, stem-cell research, and other morality issues by starting with CAP databases on those topics in several countries, then developing issue-specific definitions of the various positions or frames on the issue […]. (Baumgartner et al. 2019, pp. 7–8)

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Rose and Baumgartner improved this line of research and the related methodological skills in their study of poverty policies (2013). Arnhold, in this volume, gives a clear demonstration of the added value of a closer study of media narratives, using elaborated coding of media categorizations. Interested in documenting which issues are on the agendas at the same time in different countries or are triggered by international agendas, the agenda setting perspective focuses more on “raw” comparison than on the diffusion mechanisms explored by the sociology of innovation and dissemination (Strang & Soule, 1998). In this regard, it faces similar challenges to the social problem construction perspective (Hassenteufel, 2010). While it has greater difficulty in linking frame changes to actors’ power games than the social problem construction perspective does (see Nollet, in this volume), it has recently tried to consider the competition for attention between different kinds of issues, to track issues’ evolution between governance levels or scale levels (Princen, 2007), or to explain why the evolutions are the same in different countries (Green-Pedersen, in this volume). Parallel with its internationalization, the agenda setting perspective has also extended its scope in other ways. If its original focus was primarily on how issues become publicized and get onto political agendas (bills, laws, parliamentary debates), the range of agendas studied has broadened to include social movements, political parties, or media platforms (Walgrave & Vliegenthart, 2019). The transformation of issues in the next stages of the policy process, prominently studied by Kingdon in his book Agendas, alternatives, and public policies (1984), has given birth to an outstanding body of research within the realm of the Multiple Streams Framework (Zohlnöfer & Rüb, 2015, special issue of the European Journal of Political Research). This research contributes toward integrating the agenda setting approach with public policy studies, with a bridge being the impacts of agenda setting on policy frames and outputs. This joins up with efforts to bring the social problem and public policy analysis closer together by paying attention to claims-makers forging alliances with political representatives to build new domains of state action (Boussaguet, 2008, comparing three national case studies of pedophilia) or by pointing out that problems brokers and policy brokers may be two different types of actors (Knaggard, 2015). The comparative turn in the agenda setting perspective has also moved it closer to comparative politics (Brouard, Chaqués, Green-Pedersen, &

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Timmermans, 2009), though neither the agenda setting nor the problem construction approach has yet made sufficient use of the huge and rich literature on policy transfers and their diffusion (Delpeuch, 2008 for an overview; Dolowitz & March, 1996). Surprisingly the movement of solutions does not seem to have a lot in common with the movement of problems. One could argue, drawing on the “garbage can” paradigm, that solutions can move alone, just inventing problems or looking for them as “pegs,” but it is doubtful whether this explanation covers the whole range of how solutions move.

Inviting to Uphill Battles for Interdisciplinary Connections The study of the globalization of issues and problems by political scientists and sociologists is even less connected with specialists of international relations (for more on this absence of dialog and the way to push it, see Katzarova and Neveu, in this volume). Exploring the rise of “transnational social fields” where problems are defined, diffused, and managed, Kauppi (2018) writes: Political science and IR are still very much separate disciplines that are in competition with one another. […] Given this disciplinary inertia, alternative ontologies, often from disciplines such as economics and sociology, are seen as illegitimate curiosities that merely supplement established scholarly classifications. Drawing a new political map that would replace old maps is a scholarly uphill battle.

The fight is sometimes successful, as when a journal like International Political Sociology, created in 2007, bridges international relations and sociology. However, the most common behavior remains, alas, mutual ignorance between international relations and the political sociologies of international agenda setting or problem building. The exponential growth of social movement studies has also produced stimulating contributions, especially as the question of denationalizing case studies has been debated since the early 1990s (McAdam & Rucht, 1993), opening the door to much research on transnational mobilizations and frame diffusions. Some of the central concepts of social movement research (Political Opportunity Structures, repertoires of contention) could also be fruitfully translated into global problem studies. But here

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again the connection between these two academic traditions is more a work in progress than a strongly institutionalized research subfield. One should finally mention that economic sociology is working to make sense not only of the strategies of “global” firms but also of the oppositions and resistances that they face—on issues such as biofuels (Cloteau, in this volume; Schurman & Munro, 2009; Toke, 2004), food safety, fair trade, and environmental issues—is part of the unfinished jigsaw puzzle of global problems. A growing mass of research is exploring the weight and strategies of major companies in the process of globalization and the problems that they can trigger. Sociologists of economics are making innovative uses and redefinitions of concepts, such as the idea of “structure of economic opportunities” (Schurman, 2004). Building the hub of disciplines needed to make sense of the globalization of issues would also mean, as Aykut’s chapter highlight it, a connection to science and technology studies (STS). And if the book gives the last word to Dan Hallin, its is also as a caveat to have in mind both the centrality of media studies in any process of ideas and problems diffusion, as the need to consider the breadth of the changes restructuring the media ecosystems and audiences, from the global to the national scales. To sum up many of the theoretical suggestions of this book: firstly, show less respect for disciplinary borders and the habit of living in intellectual silos. It may be utopian to ask for a seamless analytical framework that would combine the contributions of the sociologies of innovation, diffusion, social movement, and economy, as well as international relations and policy studies. The institutional logic of academia is, after all, to develop research within specialized communities. More reasonably, this book might serve as a reminder that the institutional logics of academia can be detrimental to scientific knowledge. It is possible to leave the silos of hyper-specialization and, without any illusion of accessing a “global” knowledge, to value an academic culture that bridges and connects different sources of knowledge in a quest for seamless theories. Secondly, remember that the earth is not flat. We agree with Antoine Vauchez’s (2013) critical approach to the “circulatory prism,” the naïve vision of a world where everything flows and connects smoothly. Saying that the earth is not flat means that the three flows (“things and humans,” claims-makers, and ideas) identified above have to deal with balances of power between states, social groups, and business and civil society actors. Nation-states still matter. Even in the most open system, borders still exist: they are called cultural and epistemic differences and knowledge

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regimes, legal systems, and mobilized interests. Exploring the landmarks and landforms of this multidimensional earth, mapping and ranking its real borders and cultural barriers, and finally understanding how translating issues into problems succeeds or fails… such is the complex and exciting program of a new research field.

Notes 1. The book does not include four of the presentations made in Nottingham. Four of its contributors (Stefan Aykut, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Dan Hallin, and Tim Neff) joined our discussion during the process of putting together this book. 2. As stated by Mazur (2007): “While conventional social problems textbooks focus on issues in the United States, Global Social Problems examines major problems around the world” (cover). 3. For example: “Beginning with a broad history of how humanity came to be divided along its present major social cleavages, the text then turns to the specific problems of war, social inequality, population, and resources and environment. It is intended as a core reading for a class on global social problems including war, inequality, population, and resources and environment” (Mazur, 2007, cover). 4. The growing attention of academia to the rise and complexification of international interdependencies has produced innovative research exploring their cultural dimensions (Robertson, 1992), their economic and spatial dimensions (Sassen, 2007), and their political implications for states (Badie, 1999) and for international networks of activists (Della Porta & Tarrow, 2005; Keck & Sikkink, 1998). Our approach will follow some of these lines of research. 5. The irony of academic agendas was that the European community of research on agenda setting had its own workshop during the Nottingham joint sessions of the ECPR which limited intellectual interactions. 6. In 1993, Santiago edited a special issue entitled “Global Perspectives on Social Problems.” The papers were driven by an economic comparative approach, addressing how and why states cope differently with similar problems for ideological or material reasons. 7. The 2016 conference of the American Society for the Study of Global Problems was entitled “Globalizing social problems.” In his presentation of the theme, the chair emphasized: “While I know that many of my colleagues, in their narrow silos of specialization probably don’t spend much time considering this, in fact, I would argue that all of the social problems we study today, in fact, are impacted by various global forces. Virtually every subfield and nearly all research – including that which seems to have much more

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narrow geographic or institutional foci – can be enriched by ‘bringing the global in,’ and locating the specific sociological facts in term of their places in a matrix of various worldwide vectors of global influence, flows, and structures” (Smith, n.d.). 8. The dozen countries that are included are centered on Western Europe.

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Linders, A., & Bogard, C. (2014). Teenage pregnancy as a social problem: A comparison of Sweden and the United States. In A. L. Cherry & M. E. Dillon (Eds.), International handbook of adolescent pregnancy (pp. 147–156). Berlin: Springer Science. Lippert, R. (1990). The construction of Satanism as a social problem in Canada. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 15(4), 417–439. Mazur, A. (2007). Global social problems. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. McAdam, D., & Rucht, D. (1993). The cross-national diffusion of movement ideas. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 528(1), 56–74. McCombs, M., & Shaw, D. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176–187. Moses, J., & Daunton, M. (Eds.). (2014). Borders crossing: Global dynamics of social policies and problems [Special issue]. The Journal of Global History, 9(2), 177–188. Neveu, E. (2017). How do social problems and social conflicts travel across borders. Journal of Conflict and Integration, 1(1), 8–38. Princen, S. (2007). Agenda-setting in the European Union: A theoretical exploration and agenda for research. Journal of European Public Policy, 14(1), 21–38. Princen, S. (2009). Agenda-setting in the European Union. London: Palgrave. Richardson, J. (1997). The social construction of Satanism: Understanding an international social problem. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 32(1), 61–85. Richardson, J., Best, J., & Bromley, D. (1991). The Satanism scare. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social theory and global culture. London: Sage. Roggeband, C. (2007). Translators and transformers, international inspiration and exchange in social movements. Social Movement Studies, 6(3), 245–259. Rose, M., & Baumgartner, F. (2013). Framing the poor: Media coverage and U.S. poverty policy, 1960–2008. Policy Studies Journal, 41(1), 22–53. Saguy, A. (2003). What is sexual harassment? From Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saguy, A., Gruys, K., & Gong, S. (2010). Social problem construction and national context: News reporting on “overweight” and “obesity” in the United States and France. Social Problems, 57 (4), 587–610. Santiago, A. (1993). Comments from the special collection editor: Global perspectives on social problems—Current issues and debates. Social Problems, 40(2), 207–212. Sassen, S. (2007). A sociology of globalization. New York: Norton.

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PART I

Globalization of Issues and Problems: Frameworks Revisited

CHAPTER 2

The Forgotten Guest: International Relations and the Globalization of Social Problems Elitza Katzarova and Erik Neveu

In Grimm’s fairy tale, “The sleeping beauty,” great harm comes from not inviting an overly invested fairy to the Princess’s christening. As the rising transnationalization of public problems and policy solutions creates new puzzles and new intellectual challenges, some harm might come from the oversight of yet another forgotten guest. Indeed, is it possible to develop a research agenda on global problems without help from the discipline of International Relations (IR)? The rising transnationalization of public problems and policy solutions has created a research intersection of growing importance. A number of research agendas intersect in the study of the transnationalization of public problems: the sociology of public problem construction, the comparative approach of agendas (Engeli, Green-Pedersen, & Larsen, 2012), the sociology of innovation and diffusion (Strang & Soule, 1998), and economic sociology and policy transfer studies. Strangely,

E. Katzarova University of Trento, Trento, Italy E. Neveu (B) Sciences Po, Rennes, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_2

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theories from IR—despite their rich contribution to the study of international policies (Petiteville & Smith, 2006) and international regulation (Büthe & Mattli, 2011)—are rarely mobilized in these scientific discussions. This surprising oversight comes probably from disciplinary hyperspecializations and from the somewhat insular position of the discipline of IR. The aim of this chapter is to bring some insights from IR into the intellectual landscape of research on the globalization of problems and agendas and to establish a research dialogue between IR and the sociological study of global problems. To delineate an IR perspective to the sociological study of global problems would entail an inquiry into the “IR imagination,” which goes well beyond the scope of this chapter. An IR approach to the social construction of global problems is a much more manageable task from the vantage point of a specific IR theory. The most natural suspect is, of course, social constructivism, which already owes much of its development to sociology. At the same time, using a strictly IR constructivist approach would not provide much value added to a sociological approach because it would, to some extent, entail that sociology reflects on itself, as IR constructivism is already sufficiently “sociological” (Lawson & Shilliam, 2010). The real value added of an IR approach would therefore be to contribute a reading of foreign affairs that supplies something different from sociology. IR established itself as a discrete area of study with the assertion that there is something fundamentally different about the international sphere, which does not allow for sociological and political science approaches to cover the dynamics of international relations. IR also arrived at the academic scene with an insight into the tensions between state power and international cooperation, which would be essential for the management of global problems. If we were to delimit the basic difference between domestic and international politics, two concepts might suffice: states and anarchy. Both of these concepts owe much to Realism, which was the dominant perspective in the discipline until the 1990s and the end of the Cold War. Despite its relative demise, Realism is still instructive of how an IR scholar thinks differently than a sociologist or political scientist. In a world lacking central authority, states compete for power and resources. It is a grim Hobbesian world of self-help, in which attempts at cooperation are just one more tool in the arsenal of nation-states to maximize their self-interest. Common rules and institutions are epiphenomenal in this anarchical world and can be ignored or even destroyed if they no longer serve the powerful of the day.

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The dog-eat-dog world of Realism has seemingly little to do with the cooperative version of the world in which global problems are defined and governed in common. Yet, Realism can provide a reading of global social problems, which could be of relevance to understanding problem globalization. The first tenet of a realist constructivist approach to global problems would be based on the centrality of the state in the definition and management of global social ills. Powerful states, or hegemons, would provide leadership in tackling global problems to maximize their own power. When viewed from a constructivist perspective, hegemonic powers would also initiate processes of globalization of problems and their solutions in order to impose their own—domestically grown—definitions and remedies to the rest of the world. To define and govern global problems would also mean to define and govern the world. A relevant example comes from the global management of crime control, which from money laundering through human trafficking to corruption owes much to the United States. While it is a positive development for the United States to try to keep global criminal activities under wraps, this also gives the US government immense influence over definitions and practices in other countries, until the management of global crime control becomes more and more “Americanized.” Anti-corruption policies underwent a period of intense globalization in the decade between the mid-90s to mid-2000s, which turned corruption from a non-issue in global affairs into an indisputable global problem (Katzarova, 2018). While we can look at corruption as an isolated problem, we can also see it in the general pattern of “global” crimes, such as money laundering and human trafficking, which emerged with new force in the 1990s, to a large extent as a US initiative (Jakobi, 2013). Furthermore, if we enlarge the scope even further, we can see the US attempt to criminalize (and in the process globalize) various issues as part of a much bigger pattern. According to Andreas and Nadelmann (2006) this currently USinspired approach to moving crime control beyond borders makes part of a much larger attempt by Western powers to export their own crime definitions to the rest of the world, sometimes for economic gain, but also in an attempt to promote their own understanding of morals to the rest of the world. While the transnationalization of crime is an unintended, yet natural consequence of other forms of economic globalization, the content and timing of defining and prosecuting global crimes is not a neutral process but an arena for power politics.

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In the field of global crime, the case of corruption is characteristic of the way in which a powerful state can dominate the emergence and development of a global governance field in a way that not only addresses a particular problem but also legitimizes a particular worldview and stabilizes the status quo in international economic affairs. In the 1970s, corruption emerged as a criticism of the lack of global rules, which would regulate the conduct of multinational corporations across borders. The concern was that multinational corporations are escaping the grip of national laws and are bending the rules of politics to their economic benefit. US-based multinationals were at the forefront of such concerns due to a number of high-profile corporate scandals. Although the problem was raised by developing nations as a criticism of the unregulated character of the global economy, the United States managed to own the issue and limit it to the much more narrow (and manageable) problem of transnational bribery. It is in the construction of corruption as a global issue that power politics can be found to reside. If corruption is seen as a natural problem, then the fact that the United States managed to imprint their own legal approach on anti-corruption treaties by internationalizing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) (Katzarova & Ansart, 2020) appears rather insignificant. If corruption is seen as a process of social construction in which competing definitions of the same conditions are promoted by different actors, however, whose definitions prevail in the emergence of a new issue for global governance becomes a political question, which is laden with power struggles. We can see that from the vantage point of an IR-inspired perspective, global problems can become products of global politics, which institutionalize underlying power relations and sometimes universalize the values of a couple of powerful nation-states. A strong state sponsor might make or break a global problem, and do so in a discrete way under the blanket of (inter)governmental confidentiality. In addition to paying attention to the state as a collective actor, a classic IR reading might also adopt a more formalized approach, in which global problems are understood as the products of international law. It is again the role of states in embedding global problems within the tapestry of international conventions and treaties that would signify the successful career of a global social issue. This reading of global problems’ diffusion should also alert researchers to the confidentiality of intergovernmental talks and the inherent difficulties of obtaining (especially recent) data. The processes through which problems are “globalized” at international organizations might not be visible

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because official communiques might be readily available, but the intergovernmental talks that produced them are often made behind closed doors. The application of this “realist constructivist” (Barkin, 2011) approach to the globalization of social problems is further developed in this chapter along more “sociological” research concepts and tools. Together this interdisciplinary compendium offers researchers a variety of options in understanding the actors, venues, and diffusion mechanisms, which contribute to the globalization of social issues. Our plea for the reintegration of IR in the tool kit of global problem analysis is further systematized in a provisional mapping of the discipline’s possible contributions focused on four pillars: (1) the definition of global problems; (2) the identity of the actors; (3) the venues at which the actors interact; and, finally; (4) the diffusion mechanisms which make problems spread between and beyond these venues.

Definition: What Makes a Social Problem “Global”? “Global” and “Globalization” are now buzzwords, the meaning of which is too often fuzzy. When can we label a social problem “global”? One answer could come from a “convergence” or “simultaneity” approach. In different countries, an issue is considered as a major challenge; it reaches the top of public opinion and the political agenda. One can argue that the importance of mass unemployment in many European countries, or the environmental challenges linked to the use of fossil fuels transformed these issues into “global social problems.” Most of the early academic books dealing with “global social problems ” (Glynn, Hohm, & Glenn, 1997; Mazur, 1991) were based on studying the historical process of problems’ convergence through which the same issues drew the attention of the media and public opinion in many countries. Another definitional perspective would be that “global” problems emerge from the growing interdependency between economic systems and populations. This approach entails a process of “contagion,” more than simple convergence, in the ranking among national agendas of issues and problems. Immigration is a “global” problem because the migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean Sea could be some months later in Calais or Hamburg. Global health problems are triggered by the growing flows of tourists, who carry the avian flu or HIV viruses beyond borders; or because winds are pushing the pollution of Chinese metropoles over

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Korea. However, as it has already been suggested in the introduction of this volume, the globalization of social problems is also a cognitive and symbolic process. The definition of threats, issues, and solutions are also crossing borders. Threats can be a supposed influence on the youth of international “Satanist” networks (Lippert, 1990), feminist claims against sexual harassment can move beyond borders as shown by the #metoo movement. Frame circulation is visible in the international spread of the category of “sex-worker” versus the old stigmatized category of “prostitution” (Jenness, 1990). The presence of these three different levels of “problem globalization” (convergence, contagion, and cognitive approaches) reveals the ambiguity of the academic literature on the question of definition. Our suggestion for the definition of global problems would be to come back to the basics of the sociology of social problems: to the claims-makers. Spector and Kitsuse define social problems as “the activities of individuals or groups making assertions or grievances and claims with respect to some putative condition” (2009, p. 75). This condition is in need of amelioration according to the etiology presented in the claims. Global problems are, therefore, the claims-making activities of state and non-state actors who make assertions that some putative condition is a problem that can be ameliorated only through coordinated action at a global level, or by processes of policy transfer or policy standardization. Global claims would not only argue that a problem exists, but they would be directed at proving that this problem is best addressed through coordinated action at the global level. In addition, a different set of agents would be engaged in global claims-making activities. These two major differences, between national and global claims-making, are given further attention and illustrated with relevant examples from IR scholarship. The amelioration of global problems is often the prerogative of global governance structures, and global governance can indeed be defined as “collective actions to establish international institutions and norms to cope with the causes and consequences of adverse supranational, transnational, or national problems” (Väyrynen, 1999, p. 25). Demand for global governance is intensified through globalization, and global governance is to an extent a collective response to global problems. Claims-making activities that demand a global response are a prerequisite for the social construction of global problems. While the term “global” can be applied to a variety of conditions that are encountered by state and non-state actors, as long as there are no demands for the creation of institutional

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structures with international or transnational character, we cannot speak of a global governance problem. This point is an invitation to connect to IR approaches the question of “non-problematicity,” which Henry develops in this volume. For example, while both corruption and unemployment are often referred to as pressing “global problems,” the former has by no means reached the global governance status of the latter. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated the global number of unemployed persons for 2017 to be over 201 million and the BBC World Service Survey showed that unemployment has joined corruption and poverty as the most talked about global problems (GlobeScan, 2011). Yet, no global claims have been made of unemployment being in need of a systematic global governance approach. The IMF has made appeals for international coordination of policies on aggregate demand to boost job creation indirectly but has not recommended coordination of labor market policies (Blanchard & Jaumotte, 2013; Gali & Blanchard, 2010). While unemployment is often referred to as a “global” problem because many nation-states have undesirably high unemployment rates, unemployment is still not a global problem as intended here. As mentioned earlier, the “non-problematicity” (Freudenburg, 2000) of unemployment as an issue for global governance is in stark contrast with the highly institutionalized nature of corruption as a global governance issue (McCoy & Heckel, 2001; Rosenau & Wang, 2001). While unemployment rivals corruption in worldwide public concern, this concern is not yet matched by successful claims-making activities that will boost unemployment as a global agenda item. The construction of unemployment as a global governance problem would begin with claims-making that the unemployment numbers can be tackled only through collective action at a global level and these claims can then be legitimated in the framework of different international forums. The subsequent attempt to govern the problem of unemployment globally would mark the beginning of a stage of institutionalization. The success of such claims-making activities would also depend both on the strength of its supporters and of the international organizations that they would be able to enlist or mobilize. To put it in a nutshell, the couple “multinational corporations and WTO” might be much more efficient in problem definition and management than the couple “Union Networks (WFTU, ICFTU, ITUC) and ILO.”

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Agency: Who Makes a Global Problem? The participants in the process of claims-making will differ in national and international environments (Table 2.1). One of the contributions of sociological approaches has been to emphasize the growing variety of global claims-makers. Transforming national issues into global problems can sometimes be done by the raw resource of military force, such as when the Iraqi regime is defined as a global threat to world security with its (imaginary) weapons of mass destruction. It could be produced by the (ab)use of law, when the US government gives to some of its laws a universal jurisdiction, fining French banks or German companies for trading with Iran or Cuba. But power in interstate relations is not solely brute material force, since, as Dahl (1957) famously argued, the ability to make others do what otherwise they would not have done is at the core of power relations. The greatest success of power, therefore, is to coerce without threatening: “political power is ultimately about persuasion, about convincing others rather than forcing” (Barkin, 2011, p. 19). Persuasion can be seen as the opposite of power, understood as material force, and is therefore seen as the weapon of the weak. Consequently, the agents of persuasion at the global level are often Table 2.1 National and transnational claims-makers

National claims-makers

Global claims-makers

1. Governmental and municipal bodies and agencies 2. Pressure groups: Political activists and lobbyists 3. Moral entrepreneurs

1. States

4. Academic experts: Academic and Social researchers 5. The traditional and social media: Newspaper columnists, media commentators

2. International Organizations 3. Global civil society/global business 4. Epistemic communities

5. Global traditional and social media

Note Source on national claims-makers: Spector and Kitsuse (2009)

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identified as civil society actors, epistemic communities, and other nonstate actors who do not possess the same material capabilities as states. In the creation of global problems, however, state actors can be central players who embark on persuasion campaigns. Their material power is not irrelevant, but at the same time cannot completely account for the outcome and the methods they use. States remain central and strategic actors in the definition and management of global problems, but scholars should not be blind to the importance of other actors. International organizations constitute another global actor who can engage in claims-making activities or at least provide a venue for such activities. One should also think of the advocacy networks of “activists beyond borders ” studied by Keck and Sikkink (1998). The ecology of claims-makers acting at the international level to promote global problems is also made of epistemic communities (Haas, 1992). Foundations matter too, as brokers between competing claimsmakers, inventing new tools of global problem management, such as systems of certification. If they are not always, strictly speaking, claimsmakers, many international monitoring institutions could be defined as global problem triggers (Pons, 2012). The PISA system of production of data, ranking the performances of the national systems of education, supplies data that is automatically “globalizing” comparisons, opening the door to the identification of failed systems and success stories such as the Finnish model. Getting rid of the “parallel” lives and absence of communication between IR, political science, and sociology means focusing on the processes of hybridization, which develop in a globalized world. International Non governmental organisations (INGOs) or activist networks are not always the pure and untamed expression of an international civil society challenging state power. They are sometimes the forerunners of future IGOs and they develop complex games of bargaining with state authorities and existing IGOs. The fact that the treaty banning landmines was signed in Ottawa in 1997 is a symbolic expression of the support brought by Canada (and South Africa) to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). NGOs are also using international law and treaties as resources to get funding and to expand their legal opportunities for action. The International Gay and Lesbian Association (IGLA) struggled to promote the rights of sexual minorities in the Treaty of Amsterdam and used the treaty article 13 to gain the support of EU institutions and access to the circle of problem owners (Paternotte, 2016). Hybridization among and between actors is also

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visible in the surprising cooperation between corporate actors, foundations, and some social movements to invent consensual definitions of problems and innovative solutions, such as the certification of forests, which guarantees the sustainable use of timber (Bartley, 2007a, 2007b) or the fair trade of coffee, which provides better income for producers (Jaffee, 2012). Thinking about hybridization could even mean paying attention to how lobbies are able to highjack the repertoires of action of social movements and how NGOs promote business interests under the cover of civil society associations (Walker, 2014). That a problem is a legitimate global governance issue can become a major point of contestation, which can further complicate the identities of the actors/claims-makers. The social construction of problems is an intersubjective process characterized by claims and counterclaims and in the context of global governance it shows some similarity to the conceptualization of Abbott and Snidal (2000), who distinguish between “demandeurs” and “resisters” in the production of international legislation. Demandeurs are “states (and other actors) that have worked to obtain commitments from others, often in the face of strong resistance” (431). In international law, legal regimes often become “functions of demandeur preferences” (Gopalan, 2008). This distinction echoes the classical distinction developed in sociology of the construction of social problems: the struggle for the agenda develops between competing problems, but the battle also rages between competing frames and visions of the “same” problem. Is drunk driving a simple question of individual responsibility of drivers or is it linked to broader issues concerning public transportation and urban organization (Gusfield, 1981)? The use of antipersonnel landmines was defined by many states as a problem of military choice and national security, and the INGO ICBL had to struggle to reframe the issue as a humanitarian problem (Rutherford, 2010). When the construction of social problems becomes the product of a process of collective definition, the resisters stop being presented as simply being in opposition to the problem, and become contestant claimsmakers in the construction of the problem. This shift sheds new light on the production of global governance structures. In the global arena, state and non-state claims-makers make their bids for legitimacy in front of official organizations and in front of each other. Resource mobilization is an intrinsic part of explaining the puzzle as to why some actors fail to legitimize their claims in front of the official authorities or other actors. For global problems, as for any other

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social problems, part of the answer as to why some problems emerge while others are suppressed comes from unequal resources and resource mobilization power, which is central to the literature on social movements. Groups with higher membership, economic resources, and more sophisticated organization are more likely to have their claims processed as legitimate. The power of a group to make claims is understood as the ability of a group to realize the demands it makes on other groups, agencies, and institutions. Therefore, the actual results that a claims-making group manages to produce are the measurement of its power. The agents of social construction at the global level are often identified as non-state actors or international organizations; but the neglect of state agency can lead to neglect of a significant factor for change in the social construction of global problems. The symbolic capital of the “demandeur” states, INGOs, or foundations also matters as a source of legitimation or as a possible stigma. This symbolic capital can come from a cultural closeness with the targets, from history, from the claims of some countries to speak in the name of universal values (Bourdieu, 1992, on the US and French cases). Toward the end of the 1940s, the United States emerged as the liberator of Western Europe and the highest performing market economy. Through the Marshall Plan, the US problem diagnoses and modernization recipes were received and diffused with gratitude and often enthusiasm. In a different context, the same process of problem-solution diffusion coming from the United States would be considered imperialist. Roger Dale (2001) coined humorously “the long spoon” strategy, the choice among a network or institution of a problem-solution herald having a good image. When the OECD, the IMF, and the World Bank campaigned to support changes in education systems in Southeast Asia, they did not appoint a US spokesperson, but recruited the former New Zealand minister of education. New Zealand was a small country without an imperialist record. As one of the most developed welfare states in the region, the turn toward New Public Management in its educational system could be perceived as a lesson from experience, not an ideological craze. Maximizing symbolic legitimacy can be achieved by selecting a country with the “right image” as the poster child of a specific governance reform.

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Venues: Where Are Global Problems Made? The analysis of agency in the social construction of global problems naturally brings us to the question of what are the venues at which the definition and diffusion of issues happens? The role of international organizations as venues at which global problems are debated and institutionalized could be central to this analysis and can offer another explanation for problem diffusion through the concept of venue shopping. It is important to acknowledge that considering international organizations to be venues, rather than actors, in global affairs is dependent on theoretical commitments. Classically, the role of international organizations in IR has been seen as threefold; international organizations can be independent actors; they can be arenas or instruments. Here, we take the middle ground in considering international organizations as venues, at which global problems are defined and diffused. The Weight of International Organizations The role of international governmental and nongovernmental organizations in diffusing common rules and practices has received much attention from different research programs in the discipline of IR. Perhaps the most relevant in this case is the literature on norm diffusion. How does diffusion through global venues happen in this IR-inspired version of a global problems perspective? One possible avenue is through the maneuvers of state actors. To further expand an example discussed earlier, the diffusion of an anti-corruption problem through a number of venues in the 1990s can be explained with the strategic behavior of state actors, who venue shop between different international organizations for the best place to achieve their goals (Katzarova, 2018). The relevance of venue shopping by state and non-state actors to the diffusion of global problems also highlights the relevance of public policy research for a global problems research agenda. International organizations have overlapping or exclusionary membership that is relevant for two main reasons that can be called competitive or collaborative. When membership overlaps (e.g., EU, OSCE, CoE) agreements reached in one forum will have to be discussed in another to ensure a common legal basis. When membership is exclusionary (e.g., EU, OAS, OECD, African Union), states may use their access to regional organizations from which their competitors

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are excluded, to dominate talks in organizations with common membership. For example, when defining a global corruption problem in the 1990s, the United States and major European states (Germany, France, and initially the United Kingdom) found themselves in disagreement. The United States used their access to the OAS, to reach an agreement and influence the talks at the OECD, while the European partners attempted the same tactic with their privileged access to the EU and the CoE. This strategic maneuvering led to the spread of the talks and the diffusion of a global problem, all the while, the OECD remained the most important target for the talks. The diffusion of the global corruption problem can, therefore, be seen as a type of unintended consequence from strategic state action. To evaluate how universal this example is would, of course, require further research and typologization of global problems. Reconnecting Research Fields Connecting the sociology of social movements to the process of problems globalization could bring an illuminating comparison here. Social movement studies suggest that there is definitive logic in venue selection. A social movement would invest in the arenas and venues where its resources have the strongest output. Any significant success of a movement can have the double effect of remobilizing its opponents and pushing them to identify alternative venues for their claims (Meyer & Staggenborg, 1996). The victory of the “Pro Choice” movement in the Supreme Court decision Roe vs Wade (1973) resulted in bringing back abortion opponents to the streets to demonstrate in front of clinics. It also gave new momentum to varied actions of lobbies and pressure groups on the GOP, with Republican presidents being strongly encouraged to seize any opportunity to appoint conservative judges at the Supreme Court who would influence its jurisprudence accordingly. Venues are never neutral places, where all claims-makers are equal and where all claims have equal chances to be heard. This is evident in the problem of rainforest exploitation (Bartley, 2007a, 2007b). The action of major foundations, opening a space of discussion between producers, major buyers of timber and the social movements mobilized against the business of exotic timber gave birth to a consensus and a “global” solution: the certification process ruled by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Committee), which is supposed to guarantee sustainable forest management. Nevertheless, the result of

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the bargaining was also the marginalization of the most critical claimsmakers asking for the end of any rainforest exploitation and the rejection of claims regarding financial support to “native communities” living in the forest zones. To quote Bartley’s paper’s title “Foundations shape social movements,” and venues and definitions are central to this influence. When problems are managed and solutions are defined at international venues, the question of the “categories of international regulation” must also be posed. To express the problem simply, at the national, as well as at the international level, public institutions can only develop policies on issues and topics considered to belong to the legitimate sphere of action of public authorities. “Inventing” ministries of the environment, agencies for women’s rights or institutions regulating food safety has been the result of lasting mobilizations and epistemic changes in the vision of what a state could and should do. A glance at the international institutional system suggests that its organizational architecture is one step behind the changes visible at national levels: a strong WTO has no equivalent in the management of environmental problems. There is no IGO seriously bridging the issues of working conditions to a vision of trade, which is fair and sustainable and not only “free.” A final suggestion would be to explore the notion of “global political opportunity structures.” How do trigger events (Fukushima studied by Arnhold in this book), political changes in major countries or new forms of mobilizations (the action of international pools of investigative reporters revealing how global companies or wealthy individuals are escaping taxation) modify the power imbalances, redefine the nature of possible global regulations and open “windows of opportunity” for the success of claims and causes. Bringing IR back to global problems studies also means mobilizing beyond national borders the analytical tools developed by Kindgon (1984), Baumgartner and Jones (2009), or Culpepper (2011).

Diffusion: How Do Global Problems Spread? To gain a better understanding of the diffusion mechanisms, we can borrow from the immense literature on norm and policy diffusion. The transnational diffusion of norms, policies, institutions, and ideas is often seen to result from the interdependence between countries in a globalized world (Gilardi, 2012). As Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett, (2006) argue, policy decisions in one country become conditional on policy decisions in other countries. The mechanisms through which this diffusion can be

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enacted have been separated into four general groups: coercion, competition, learning, and emulation (Braun & Gilardi, 2006). Coercion largely depends on the agency of powerful nation-states and powerful organizations. Competition happens when economic competition between countries leads to the adoption of similar policies. Learning happens when countries adopt policies simply because they appear as the best solutions to current predicaments. Emulation, while similar to learning, happens when countries emulate policies not so much because of their intrinsic value in solving practical problems, but because of their social legitimacy. According to Gilardi (2012), diffusion through emulation comes closest to research on norm diffusion and is compatible with sociological research. The process of problem globalization can also be understood as a process of translation. If globalization is linked to a process of internationalization of claims-making and policy choices, problem definition must make sense from one country to another. Networks of pro-choice or opponents to abortion are developing beyond borders, but the arguments working in Washington, may be pointless in Stockholm or Prague. In a historical comparison, Linders (1998) showed how, even among claims-makers sharing the vision of abortion as a moral failure, specific arguments could be deeply diverging. The American framing of the problem can be repressive, because it targets middle-class women, who abort “out of convenience,” weakening the demographics already threatened by the flow of “bad immigrants.” The Swedish framing is more tolerant, it focuses on working-class mothers, lacking resources to care for their babies. Distress, and not selfishness, explains abortion in the Swedish case. In other words, translating problems to globalize them means bridging cultural differences, or being able to stage-manage variations in the justifications of a problem. As British women and families don’t share the therapeutic culture typical of the United States, the reference to “Post-Abortion Syndrome” as a catastrophic consequence of abortions does not trigger a strong reaction in the UK, especially since, being allowed by a physician, abortion appears as a safe if extraordinary medical act (Lee in Best, 2001, pp. 59–62). Furthermore, suggesting that a problem is imported and imposed by an unfriendly “demandeur” state or international organization is often a good tactic to delegitimize it. This is visible in the tactic of the Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, and Russian governments, who translate the claims of human rights NGOs as plots by enemy powers to challenge the country’s sovereignty. In some

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situations, the stage management of problem globalization would even mean suggesting that using the same label does not mean borrowing the interpretive categories of “the other.” The concept of translation should not be limited to its cultural or symbolic dimension. Pleading for a “sociology of translation,” Bruno Latour (1984) suggests another use of the term: to translate also means to enlist, to be able to build strong chains of support and partnerships. Mobilizing strategic actors (politicians, public intellectuals, journalists, and social movements) in the target countries is a good way for the “demandeur” institution to limit the opposition of “resisters.” Among the most successful experiences of problem diffusion, many were able to structure a dense network connecting grassroots organizations, social movements, NGOs, or intellectuals at the national level. Liu (2006) develops a surprising but convincing explanation for the success of the Platform for Action (PFA) on women’s rights voted in Beijing in 1995. If the PFA agenda received strong support in China and strong resistance in India, it was not because of the influence of the Chinese Communist Party but despite it, this official platform giving an ideologically safe resource to Chinese women’s organizations while the Indian ones were defending a specific Indian way of emancipation and economic growth. Norm diffusion research is another vast area of study in IR that could be considered for an agenda on global problem diffusion. Norm entrepreneurs can be states, supranational actors, and transnational actors (such as, NGOs, epistemic communities, and social movements) (Tallberg et al., 2018). The element of diffusion here can also be captured by the classic concept of a norm cascade (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998). When approximately one-third of states have accepted the appropriateness of the new norm, a norm cascade happens, usually through international organizations and agencies. Beyond this morphological dimension, the nature and directions of the flow of problem building can also be questioned. Some processes of globalization are “pushed” when an international network works to promote a problem beyond its original birthplace (the case of “Satanism,” the taxation of GAFA income). “Mainstreaming” may be identified as a top-down case of “push” when a powerful international organization, such as the EU, is able to promote a couple of problem prominence/policy solutions to its membership in relation to “gender mainstreaming” in support of women’s rights (Cirstocea, Lacombe, & Maheu, 2017). In other situations problem globalization could be “pulled” when actors located in one or several countries are importing

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frames, resources, and enlisting allies in other countries to boost their claims and to modify the local political or public opinion agendas. The legacy of policy transfer studies supplies here stimulating contributions explaining both the causes and effects of cross-national policy convergence (Holzinger & Knill, 2005), suggesting, beyond the cultural and spatial variables, the possible role of structural isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) or institutional equivalence (Strang & Meyer, 1993) between the source and the adopter.

Conclusion This chapter argued that there are some benefits to including an IR perspective in the study of global problems. In particular, a classic IR focus on power and state interests, shines a different light on the actors, venues, and diffusion mechanisms, which make or break a global problem. On the other hand, the construction of global problems as a perspective on global governance offers a potentially new interpretation of how ideational factors contribute to the establishment and institutionalization of power at the international level, and that this power can also be ideational. The ability of some agents to establish their version of reality is inseparable from their relative power. The struggle of ideas at the global level can be seen as a power struggle in which the stronger prevail not necessarily because of the validity of their argument. The ideas that are established as legitimate in this power struggle contribute to the social construction of one version of reality over another. While this chapter adumbrated the added value of an IR approach to the social construction of global problems, better understanding the processes through which global problems emerge and perish can also be revealing of the way in which global affairs work. If there is one basic insight from a research agenda on the construction of social problems, it is that problems are not naturally defined, that the power and resources of agents matter immensely, and that venues are not neutral. These basic insights can have a profound influence on a rather naïve understanding of global governance in which technical problems are promoted by disinterested actors, only to be complicated and buried by the messy business of global and national politics. If nothing else, the process of social construction of problems is deeply political and at the same time revealing of the way in which politics works in national and global settings.

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CHAPTER 3

Hepatitis B, a Global Disease? On Some Paradoxes of the Construction of Global Health Problems Maëlle de Seze

Over the past three decades, health issues have become more and more central in public policies, in particular those related to international relations (Robinson & de Leeuw, 2015) and international development (David, 2011). The field of global health has emerged, perceived by many as the globalization of public health: the management of diseases at the transnational level (Fidler, 1997; Lee, Buse, & Fustukian, 2002). Originally, actors in global health focused mainly on infectious diseases— as their predecessors, specialized in “international health” or “tropical health,” used to—but overtime, global health evolved (Brown, Cueto, & Fee, 2006) and became defined as “an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide” (Koplan et al., 2009). Although several social scientists studied the field of global health, in particular the power relations in, and the governance of this field, as well

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as the legitimacy of actors who define global health problems and the way to address them, they rarely questioned which health issues were constructed into global problems, why, how, and by whom. Are global health problems only the result of the globalization of public health problems? Can a health issue that was not a public problem still be constructed as a global problem? Once a health issue becomes constructed as a global problem, does it change the way to address the issue at the national level? That is to say, does the framing of global health problems affect the framing of public health problems? Those are the questions addressed in this chapter, using the case of Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) that causes the death of nearly one million people every year from cirrhosis or liver cancer. Yet, hepatitis B was not constructed as a major global health problem like HIV, tuberculosis, or malaria in the 1990s and 2000s, and viral hepatitis was not acknowledged by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a global problem before 2010. The rise of global health in the 1990s coincided with the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that received most efforts and attention in the field, relegating other infectious diseases “in the shadow” (Lemoine, Girard, Thursz, & Raguin, 2012)—to the exception of tuberculosis and malaria. This focus on, and prioritization of HIV/AIDS have been questioned and discussed by several social scientists (Hunsmann, 2012, 2016; Parkhurst & Hunsmann, 2015; Shiffman, 2006a, 2006b, 2008; Shiffman, Berlan, & Hafner, 2009). Jeremy Shiffman has also applied a few famous concepts of the study of social problems to explain the “rise and fall” (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988) in the prioritization of certain global health issues in a short article in the Bulletin of WHO (Shiffman, 2009). With Stephanie Smith, he developed a framework to analyze the generation of political priority in global health (2007) and explain agenda-setting—or not—of health issues, that was later tested on several case studies. But he did not focus on the construction of health issues into global problems. More recently, Shiffman and colleagues have studied the emergence and “effectiveness” of “global health networks” defined as “cross-national webs of individuals and organizations linked by a shared concern to address a particular health problem that affects or potentially affects a sizeable proportion of the world’s population” (Shiffman, 2016). The concept brings together global public policy networks (Reinicke, 1999), epistemic communities (Haas, 1992), and transnational advocacy networks (Keck & Sikkink, 1998) “as [global health networks] simultaneously serve policy, knowledge creation and advocacy functions.” They

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“exist for most high-burden health problems that low- and middleincome countries face” and their proliferation “represents one of the most dramatic shifts in global health governance over the past three decades” (Shiffman et al., 2015). The idea of “emergence and nonemergence” (Quissell, Berlan, Shiffman, & Walt, 2018) of global health networks is close to the analysis developed in this chapter. However, for analyzing the case of hepatitis B and viral hepatitis, it is highly relevant to use the classical “toolbox” of social problems studies. The first part of the chapter will show how the absence of a framing process played a major role in the nonconstruction of hepatitis B as a global problem in the 1990s and 2000s. The second part will explain both the construction of viral hepatitis as an “HIV-framed” problem in the 2010s and how the definition of the global problem also defined the way to address it, both at the global and national levels.

Hepatitis B: A Major Health Issue Not Constructed as a Global Health Problem The construction of global health problems was not often studied because of a strong belief that institutions such as WHO have the means and scientific expertise to point out which health issues deserve attention, and which do not. However, the nonconstruction of hepatitis B as a global problem questions that belief: I don’t know if there is any other major infectious disease [that we forgot]. Now it gets us thinking: ‘What else have you been sleeping on?’. […] You know, you have only 24 hours a day. How much more could you expand yourself to be thinking: ‘TB, malaria, HIV, hepatitis’ all at the same time. You have to be a little… So, I get it. Like, really, I do understand. But at the same time, you can’t be so ignorant that you would let entire major issues fall through the cuts. (IO-1)1

Global health problems are socially constructed at the transnational level, just as public health problems at the national level (Gilbert & Henry, 2009). Some health issues can remain in the “realm of fate” instead of being perceived as “amenable to human action” (Stone, 1989) even when technical and scientific solutions exist.

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Hepatitis B in the Prehistorian Age of Global Health: An Acknowledged Health Issue HBV was discovered in 1967. At the time, infection with viral hepatitis was perceived as a serious threat in hospitals, particularly in hemodialysis units, where both hospital staff and patients were daily exposed to needles, transfusion, and blood. As a doctor, Head of a Hemodialysis Centre in the 1980s (Tours Hospital, France), would later recall: Everybody was infected with viral hepatitis in the department. Sometimes, one would go to work on hands and knees, all yellow! And the patients were all infected as well…it was awful. (Dr Philippe Bagros, January 23rd, 2013)2

Less than a decade after the identification of HBV, a vaccine was developed and tested in a large randomized controlled trial in Senegal (Moulin, Chabrol, & Ouvrier, 2018). Most health scientists believed that finding an effective vaccine was the ideal solution to solve a health issue caused by a virus.3 In a Pasteurian paradigm of health science, each infectious disease had a vaccine, and the discovery of this vaccine was the Holy Grail in the quest to defeat that disease. As an illustration, the most advertised and acknowledged success in WHO’s history is the eradication of smallpox following a massive immunization campaign worldwide and the contribution of vaccination to global health is constantly reminded and highlighted to this day (Greenwood, 2014; Okwo-Bele & Cherian, 2011). Albeit being considered as one of the most effective vaccines ever invented, at the beginning of the 1980s, the production of the HBV vaccine necessitated the use of highly advanced techniques, rendering the vaccine too expensive (thirty dollars per dose) to be affordable in low- and middle-income countries. Its availability and access was thus jeopardized and it took yet another decade and the creation of an “International Task Force on Hepatitis B Immunization” to invent another vaccine-making process that would be more affordable (one dollar per dose), and improve a situation that was referred by some as “a rich man’s vaccine and a poor man’s disease” (Muraskin, 1995, p. 21). The HBV vaccine was then added to the immunization programmes of several South-East Asian and Sub-Saharan African countries—the regions where HBV killed the most—which led WHO’s World Health Assembly to pass a resolution in 1992 (WHA 45.17) that called for all member

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states, “to integrate cost-effective new vaccines, such as hepatitis B vaccine, into national immunization programmes” (Muraskin, 1995). At the time, this was perceived as a major victory in the global response to the hepatitis B pandemic and many thought that the problem would soon be solved. Main Reasons for the Fall of Scientists’ Attention to Hepatitis B in the 1990s and 2000s In 1998, about 90 countries had added HBV vaccines in their immunization programmes, including most high-income countries and most Asian countries with a high prevalence of hepatitis B (Kane, 1998). However, despite the mobilization of the Task Force, the World Health Assembly’s resolution and WHO’s goal for 1997 of integrating the HBV vaccine in all its members’ states immunization programmes, only six Sub-Saharan African countries had done it. The problem was far from being solved and it also appeared that vaccinating infants was not a perfect solution either as all people born before the beginning of the vaccination continued to be at risk for chronic infection with HBV and death from cirrhosis or liver cancer. Nevertheless, there were no other World Health Assembly resolutions on hepatitis B before 2010, and scientists’ attention to HBV considerably diminished, as if the health issue had been successfully addressed. While the interest of scientists is not enough to turn a health issue into a global health problem, without it, a health issue can hardly be considered seriously. The fall of researchers’ attention for hepatitis B played a major role in the nonconstruction of this health issue into a global problem. There are several reasons to account for this. First, in 1981, the year when the first HBV vaccines were produced by pharmaceutical companies, another blood-borne virus was noticed. This other virus, that shared many similarities with HBV, would become much more famous. To a certain extent, addressing the pandemic it caused shaped the entire field of global health, reshaped many public health dynamics and transformed doctors–patients relationships worldwide. In 1986, five years after the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published its first reports on the symptoms caused by this virus and three years after its biomolecular identification, the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses decided to call it: “Human Immunodeficiency Virus” (HIV).

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The worldwide impacts and characteristics of the HIV/AIDS pandemic have been extensively discussed elsewhere, as was the idea of “HIV/AIDS exceptionalism,” since the description of the concept (Bayer, 1991) until its use to explain or justify the exceptional response that the pandemic received at the global level (Forman, 2011; Ingram, 2013; Oppenheimer & Bayer, 2009; Smith, Ahmed, & Whiteside, 2011). Here, I suggest that it is not only “AIDS exceptionalism” but the similarities between HBV and HIV that led scientists, in particular virologists, to transfer their attention from one virus to the other. One of the three inventors of the HBV vaccine, speaking of one of his co-inventor and leader of the research team on hepatitis B—who died in 1981 (Moulin et al., 2018)—said: He had started to be interested with HIV. It was the very beginning, it was starting, it’s obvious we would have done something – and Francis Barin moved to this topic, him. […] We were hearing more and more talk about it so it’s obvious that Philippe Maupas and a part of the team would have moved on to HIV, that’s a sure thing anyway. (Dr Pierre Coursaget, February 6th, 2017)4

Francis Barin—another member of Maupas’ team, who focused on HBV from 1976 to 1981—was one of the many virologists who switched topic from HBV to HIV.5 The timing was particularly convenient, as many scientists believed the HBV problem to be mostly solved (from a scientific point of view) with the commercialization of the HBV vaccine in 1981. Most of them moved on to other health issues like HIV that they perceived to be more challenging and potentially more rewarding. After 1992 and WHO’s resolution on HBV vaccination, even the members of the Task Force gradually stopped publishing on HBV. Virologists often work on several viruses in the course of their careers— sometimes simultaneously—but in this case, all research activities on hepatitis B considerably decreased nearly everywhere because there was a vaccine: There were not many research projects still going on about hepatitis B at the time because of the vaccine. When you asked for money, you were told: ‘Well, there is a vaccine that works well now, it’s not worth it to keep doing in-depth research about that’. (Research-5)

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It is interesting to note that researchers and scientists from South-East Asia and the Western Pacific region are an exception in that matter. They never stopped producing knowledge on hepatitis B, conducting studies and publishing their results. However, their interest in the health issue was not shared in other regions or by members of global health institutions or at WHO headquarters. This shows that Asia remains a peripheral region for global health arenas, and Asian scientists, their interests, research, and publications are not enough to prioritize a disease in the field of global health. Characteristics of the Issue That Hindered Its Construction as a Global Health Problem The commercialization of a vaccine to prevent HBV transmission and the rise of other diseases competing for scientific interests are not the only reasons to explain that there was no construction of a hepatitis B global problem. The characteristics of the issue also did not fit with the existing frames of the emerging field of global health. First, hepatitis B was a health issue that blurred the line between infectious and noncommunicable diseases. This differentiation between infectious and noncommunicable diseases is structural in the organization of most health institutions at the national and international level. As an illustration, the “theory of epidemiologic transition” developed by Abdel Omran in 1971, that describes a shift in the causes of death in a given country, with infectious diseases being replaced over time by chronic diseases and accidents6 became so famous that this paper was reproduced in 2001 in the Bulletin of WHO as a “ground-breaking contribution to public health.” However, hepatitis B could neither be framed as an infectious disease nor as a chronic disease because it was both infectious and chronic. It was an infection by a virus that could become chronic and lead to the development of chronic liver diseases such as cirrhosis or liver cancer. Second, hepatitis B as a health issue also blurred the line between adult and child health. According to Michael Reich, issues linked to child health and child survival used to be favored over adult health on the international health policy agenda, “for while adults can act as moral agents, small children under five years of age generally cannot” (Reich, 1995). Hepatitis B

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could hardly be framed as a child disease: it did not kill young vulnerable children. On the contrary, most victims of HBV were grown-up men, often breadwinners for their families. As Reich stated, adult health problems could “easily include elements of blaming the victim, which complicate efforts of social mobilization and fund raising.” This was exacerbated in North America and Europe, where the prevalence of HBV was low and the virus most often acquired in adulthood, as a sexually transmitted disease or through injection drug use. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, where the prevalence of hepatitis B was the highest, the virus was transmitted in infancy or childhood. Therefore, to stop the epidemic and prevent the transmission of the virus, children had to be vaccinated as soon as possible, ideally at birth. Again, hepatitis B did not fit the existing categories: it was a health problem that had to be prevented in childhood to protect adults. Because hepatitis B did not fit into those frames, members of existing epistemic communities, international organizations or transnational advocacy networks, would either not tackle the issue—perceiving it as “too complicated”7 —or only tackle part of it. For example, many representatives of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the major fund provider for the six universal vaccines included in immunization programmes worldwide at the time, refused to pay for the HBV vaccine. This vaccine was much more expensive than the others, but the reason that they highlighted was that hepatitis B was out of the scope of UNICEF because it did not kill children. All the other vaccines were protecting children from infectious diseases that threatened them directly, not in the long term, so immediate results on child survival were visible and measurable. In the context of competition between diseases and scarce resources, hepatitis B was not a priority for UNICEF. Overall, the biomedical characteristics of the health issue did not fit into existing frames and contradicted the way networks and institutions were organized in public and global health, causing a cognitive dissonance that prevented the construction of hepatitis B as a global problem.

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Viral Hepatitis: A Multidimensional “HIV-Framed” Global Problem While hepatitis B was never framed as a global problem, the 2000s saw the construction of a new global health problem: viral hepatitis. This global problem, that was acknowledged for the first time by WHO in 2010 (resolution WHA 63.18), did not correspond to one health issue but encompassed five different viruses (hepatitis A, B, C, D, and E), each with specific characteristics. Hepatitis B was one of them. The founding members of the World Hepatitis Alliance (WHA)—one of the first patients-led associations and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to focus on infection with hepatitis viruses—decided to focus on all types of viral hepatitis instead of only one of them. They did so to raise the visibility of the five health issues at once, and increase their global burden in terms of mortality, compared to other diseases.8 However, most of those founding members and staff of the WHA were first and foremost concerned with hepatitis C. WHA originally aimed at organizing “World Hepatitis Day” as a yearly opportunity to raise attention on viral hepatitis in mass media and involve policymakers. But in time, the members of this NGO became perceived by WHO as the main representatives of “civil society” on viral hepatitis. They drafted a resolution for WHO and worked with the Brazilian government to present the resolution at the 63rd World Health Assembly. The vote of this resolution was the starting point of the rise of viral hepatitis as a global problem9 —at WHO and within other major global health institutions. Not only did the adoption of resolution WHA 63.18 by the World Health Assembly officially set “viral hepatitis” on WHO’s agenda, but it also led to the implementation of the Global Hepatitis Programme within WHO headquarters, in charge of organizing the response to the global problem. However, viral hepatitis is not a disease: it does not exist from a biomedical point of view. It is a socially constructed multidimensional global problem, framed to combine five health issues10 that affect different populations in various parts of the world (and each has its own technical solutions). In the second part of this chapter, we will focus on WHO guidelines because they play a major role in health policy convergence worldwide. We will see that most of the scientists, experts, and WHO staff involved in the response to viral hepatitis were either specialists of hepatitis C (like the

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founding members of WHA) or came from the global health network on HIV. The involvement of many members from the global health network on HIV in the response to viral hepatitis impacted all aspects of the global problem (research, activism, and policymaking). “Viral Hepatitis”: An Emerging Global Problem Since 2010, that Includes Hepatitis B “Viral hepatitis” does not refer to one single disease or virus, but to five different viruses that have very little in common. They are not genetically related, their distribution worldwide varies greatly, they are not transmitted in the same way, they do not cause the same symptoms, they do not have the same treatment, etc. In documents, archives, or recordings prior to 2007, when the expression “viral hepatitis” was used, it was used as plural. However, from 2007 and on, members of WHA started to use the expression as singular. The word “hepatitis”—which means “inflammation of the liver”—is a “mass noun” (or uncountable) in English: it does not have a plural. As most members of WHA were anglophone, they started using “viral hepatitis” as singular to purposely build a sense of unity to the problem: Because, with viral hepatitis, you have all these confusing letters from A to E and until they were clubbed together it was like: ‘Hepatitis A this, Hepatitis E that, Hepatitis B, hepatitis C…’. […] Then in 2010 when we put the resolution forward, the resolution was for ‘viral hepatitis’. […] Since then, because the resolution was adopted, all of a sudden it was about ‘viral hepatitis’. (NGO-2)

Despite this constructed unity, the various people involved in the response to each of the five different health issues had priorities and interests that depended on the virus they were most concerned with. For example, most people involved in the construction of viral hepatitis as a global problem—at WHA or other global health organizations such as Doctors of the World or Doctors Without Borders, WHO or Unitaid— came from Europe or the USA. In both Eastern and Western Europe, and most of America, it was hepatitis C virus (HCV) that was responsible for half to three-quarters of all viral hepatitis mortality (WHO 2016, p. 12). Therefore, to those actors, the response to viral hepatitis was first and foremost a response to hepatitis C.

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Hepatitis B was—and still is as of 2020—a major health issue in most of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (as well as the Amazon region). In those parts of the world, HBV was responsible for two-thirds to three-quarters of all viral hepatitis mortality (WHO 2016, p. 12). Therefore, in many Asian countries, vaccination against hepatitis B was implemented in the 1980s and 1990s and scientists did not wait until the construction of viral hepatitis as a global problem to conduct research projects on various aspects of the epidemic. However, in most Sub-Saharan African countries, vaccination did not start before the mid-2000s, sometimes even the early 2010s, and it was only in the mid-2010s that the issue started to be acknowledged as a public problem at the national level in most countries. The inclusion of hepatitis B in the definition of viral hepatitis as a new global problem played a role in this acknowledgement, as it increased the perceived severity of viral hepatitis as a whole. Regrouping all viral hepatitis mortality in one single category artificially increased “the size of the burden relative to other problems” (Shiffman & Smith, 2007) and participated in the emergence of a feeling of urgency to deal with this “new” disease that was suddenly talked about as more dangerous than HIV, malaria, or tuberculosis. However, the involvement of many members of the global health network on HIV in the construction of viral hepatitis as a global problem, as well as the initial focus on hepatitis C, played a role in the definition of the problem and in the orientation of the responses conceived to address it. Access to Hepatitis C Treatment: The Perfect Opportunity for Members of the Global Health Network on HIV to Claim Ownership of the New Global Problem The XIX International AIDS Conference that gathered more than 20,000 delegates from 190 countries in Washington DC in July 2012 was themed: “Turning the Tide Together.” One of the most frequent catchphrases during this conference was: “an HIV-free generation.” For the first time in 2012, the end of the epidemic was in sight—at least for highincome countries. Even though many scientists and activists highlighted the remaining challenges to defeat the epidemic—such as finding a cure, a vaccine, or preventing side effects of aging on antiretroviral therapy— more and more members of the global health network on HIV spoke of “the end of HIV/AIDS.”

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Accordingly, more and more of them turned to new topics, and viral hepatitis became one of the most common new interests for them, in part because many people living with HIV were also infected with hepatitis B or C. Several scientists who were working on HIV had conducted research with patients coinfected with either HBV or HCV in the 2000s, so switching to studying the mono-infection with one or the other was even easier. The process described above to explain that it was easy to switch from HBV to HIV in the 1980s was very similar to the process that happened thirty years later from HIV to HBV. In December 2013, Margaret Chan, the Director-General of WHO, decided that the Global Hepatitis Programme—that had been implemented as a part of “WHO Health Emergencies Programme” alongside influenza, cholera, meningitis, or yellow fever—would be moved to the “HIV/AIDS, TB, and other Diseases” cluster (not as an autonomous programme, like the Global Malaria Programme or the Global TB Programme, but as part of the HIV Department—that subsequently became “Department of HIV and Global Hepatitis Programme”). There were several arguments to justify the legitimacy of HIV specialists to take over the ownership (Gusfield, 1989) of the new global problem. First, WHO in general, and Margaret Chan in particular, were openly criticized by transnational NGOs—such as Doctors of the World or Treatment Action Group—for not taking the issue seriously: There was an outcry of civil society against WHO and it was really targeting the Director-General at that time, Doctor Chan, for what was considered an inadequate response by WHO to a global diseases problem. For example, there was an outcry that WHO had never developed guidelines, treatment guidelines; that WHO had not given it, overall, priority status; that there was no access approach that had underpinned our work in hepatitis. (IO-4)

Between the implementation of the Global Hepatitis Programme in 2011 and the transfer of the programme to the HIV department in December 2013, only two documents had been published, to assess the situation, and there were no guidelines for the countries to follow.11 Also, those publications hardly mentioned the arrival of the new treatments against hepatitis C, the “Direct-acting antivirals” (DAAs). Immediately after their testing and marketing authorization, DAAs were described, both in scientific journals and general media, as a “treatment revolution.”

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For members of the global health network on HIV, who had been looking for a cure for decades, unsuccessfully, and had to make do with lifelong treatments that would prevent the reproduction of the virus but could not eradicate it from the body, DAAs—which eliminated HCV from the body in less than three months with very few side effects—were considered as a “therapeutic revolution,” “an exciting paradigm shift,” and a “game changer.” “Sofosbuvir,” the first of these drugs commercialized against HCV, was launched in the USA in December 2013, by the pharmaceutical company Gilead, at 84,000 dollars for a twelve-week treatment. This unaffordable price, even for high-income countries, led to the first major mobilization in the response to viral hepatitis. The transnational advocacy network that formed to claim access to Gilead’s Sofosbuvir was largely composed of professional activists from the global health network on HIV, many of whom had been fighting for access to antiretrovirals in the 1990s and 2000s. They had successfully managed to quickly bring prices down for those drugs and had fought for access to generics in the poorest countries; they were ready to do it again for hepatitis C. I just really felt this is something we can do something about. And as I said before, I may have even underestimated what it takes because I thought, you know: ‘How can a drug that is so easy, a molecule that is very simple to produce and something that has characteristics of basically no side effects, has cure rates – for now – looking very robust… So how can this not become available?!’. (IO-4)

According to members of the global health network on HIV, because of the similarities between HIV and viral hepatitis, the know-hows and strategies developed against HIV were transferable and could be used in the context of viral hepatitis: We know how to scale up. We’ve done ‘3 by 5’12 and we have been leading, although it may not be very visible to the world, but every country is leading and advancing the HIV response […] because we are advancing their guidelines and policies every year. (IO-1)

The mobilization to lower the price of the DAAs and provide access to these new drugs against hepatitis C was the perfect opportunity for members of the global health network on HIV to get involved in the fight against viral hepatitis.

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Influence of “HIV-Framing” on Scientists, Activists, and Health Policymakers Hepatitis B is a major health issue in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, but while it was acknowledged and addressed as a public health problem in many Asian countries, in most Sub-Saharan African countries, it only started to be considered as “amenable to human action” since the mid2010s. In this last section, I intend to show how the “HIV-framing” of viral hepatitis impacted the different aspects of the response to hepatitis B in Sub-Saharan Africa (that mostly started as a result of the rise of viral hepatitis as a global problem). First there was a noticeable shift in scientific priorities. Framing viral hepatitis “in HIV terms” brought changes to the topics of research projects being conducted about HBV, results being published, and knowledge shared in the epistemic community. The two most blatant illustrations of this process are the rise of “mother-to-child transmission” (MTCT) of HBV as a new research priority in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the fall of scientific interest for aflatoxin as a co-factor of hepatitis B in the development of liver cancer in West Africa. “MTCT” is a very common concept in the global health network on HIV, used to designate the transmission of the virus in utero, at birth, and during breastfeeding. There have been countless research projects and public health programmes to prevent MTCT of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa, and prove that it was feasible and cost-effective. This was not the case for the transmission of hepatitis B from mothers to their children. On the contrary, most researchers before the 2010s agreed that, although in Asia, MTCT of HBV was frequent, in Sub-Saharan Africa it was of negligible importance. In fact, scientists rarely used the acronym “MTCT” for hepatitis B before, they used “perinatal infection” instead (transmission at birth) because there is no transmission of HBV in utero or through breastfeeding. However, since the early 2010s, MTCT of HBV has become a major concern for scientists, with several research projects funded and conducted and tens of papers published on the importance of preventing MTCT for hepatitis B in Sub-Saharan Africa through the addition of a birth dose in all vaccination programmes. In 2015, WHO even published “A Guide for Introducing and Strengthening Hepatitis B Birth Dose Vaccination.” Indeed, when the members of the global health network on

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HIV started to work on HBV, preventing MTCT seemed to be an area where their skills could be useful as they had a lot of expertise already. With the “HIV-framing” of hepatitis B, the prevention of MTCT of hepatitis B became a priority in the global response to viral hepatitis. While scientific interest for MTCT was rising, another aspect of the response to hepatitis B became invisible: the daily consumption of aflatoxin. This poison for the liver, when consumed regularly, is found in molds that develop on ground nuts or maize stored in hot and humid atmosphere. Before 2010, when scientists working on HBV were trying to address liver cancer, they often considered that addressing the issue of aflatoxin consumption was as important as HBV. The two issues are strongly connected as the main risk factor for liver cancer is chronic infection with HBV combined with dietary aflatoxin intake. Many studies have shown a synergistic effect between the two: a relative risk for liver cancer much higher when there are both present, compared with HBV infection or aflatoxin consumption alone.13 In terms of public health policies, it means that both a reduction of aflatoxin or a diminution of HBV infection can have a major impact on the number of liver cancer cases. The HBV vaccine is a major tool to address viral hepatitis as a global problem but immunization programmes are expensive and maintaining their quality in time can be a real challenge. Alternatively, taking inexpensive measures to reduce exposure to aflatoxin at the local level could also be an effective way to fight against liver diseases. Simple postharvest measures such as hand sorting moldy groundnuts, sun drying groundnuts on mats before storage or storage in natural-fiber bags instead of plastic bags have been proven to reduce by more than 50% the amount of aflatoxin.14 In addition to the health benefits, these interventions have economic benefits for farmers as they avoid spoilage (many countries or regions—such as the USA or Europe—have protected their domestic market against aflatoxin-contaminated peanuts or corn). However, most members of the global network on HIV are simply not aware of that synergy nor do they know what aflatoxin is. This explains the fall of scientific interest for this issue with the “HIVframing” of viral hepatitis since the early 2010s and also that the solutions to address liver diseases by reducing aflatoxin are not used, because they don’t fit into the frame of the problem.

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Secondly, while those examples of MTCT and aflatoxin showed how the framing of hepatitis B by members of the global health network on HIV had an impact on scientific priorities and research—and ultimately on guidelines and health policies related to the results of those research—this process did not only impact epistemic communities. The “HIV-framing” of viral hepatitis also shaped the priorities of transnational activists. As HIV activists claimed ownership of the viral hepatitis problem while using their skills and expertise to get pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of DAAs, used to cure hepatitis C, most of them were much more aware of the challenges in the response to HCV than HBV. Therefore, although there was an important transnational mobilization for access to hepatitis C treatment, the issue of the lack of access to hepatitis B treatment remained mostly invisible until the end of the 2010s. Another example is the issue of discrimination which is a major one for people living with HIV/AIDS and those living with HCV, but not necessarily for people living with HBV, who sometimes risk more when associated with HIV/AIDS than with their own disease. There are many similarities between HIV and HBV. For example, the drug most commonly used to treat chronic infection with HBV, an antiretroviral called “Tenofovir,” is also one of the most common drug used against HIV. Since 2013, WHO guidelines advise for Tenofovir to be given—for free—to all people living with HIV (including those coinfected with HBV) while in most Sub-Saharan African countries, the same drug is either not available or too expensive for people infected with HBV but not infected with HIV. As a result, in those countries, the only way for people infected with hepatitis B to get access to tenofovir is to become coinfected with HIV. This issue is largely ignored at the global level. The members of the global health network on HIV who own the problem of viral hepatitis focus on access to hepatitis C treatment rather than hepatitis B. On the contrary, at the national level in several West African countries, most interviewees were acutely aware of the lack of access to Tenofovir for HBV chronic carriers not infected with HIV. They often brought it up in a distraught tone, as one of the most troubling situations they had come upon, as they witnessed people living with hepatitis B deliberately trying to get infected with HIV, to get access to Tenofovir.

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While this issue remained invisible, the prevention of discriminations against people living with viral hepatitis became a major concern for activists of the global health network. In fact, the prevention of discrimination toward people living with HIV/AIDS was rooted at the heart of the original idea of “AIDS exceptionalism” (Bayer, 1991). Once known as “Gay Related Immune Deficiency,” AIDS has been framed as a human rights issue because patients would be discriminated against for being infected with HIV. The same process happened for hepatitis C, as one of the “key populations”—in which the prevalence of hepatitis C is much higher than in the general population—was injecting drug users. Therefore, in Europe and North America, activists have been fighting together with epidemiologists for better access to care and to lessen infections with hepatitis C for injecting drug users: fighting against discriminations was— and still is—constructed as a public health measure. Therefore, it is not surprising that the fight against discrimination came forward as a priority to address viral hepatitis as a global problem. However, in many Sub-Saharan countries where hepatitis B is a major health issue but has not been constructed as a social problem, viral hepatitis is still unknown to most people. In The Gambia and Senegal for example, in 2017 and 2018, several people diagnosed with hepatitis B— and several doctors—explained that there was no stigma associated with viral hepatitis because nobody knew what it was. Because there was no negative representation or symbolic dimension associated with viral hepatitis (or hepatitis B), there was no discrimination. On the other hand, the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS was very strong, and many people living with viral hepatitis feared being associated with HIV: It was difficult, because when a patient was infected with hepatitis, to get Tenofovir, he had to go through the AIDS Control Programme. And that led to a major blockage. You see, a patient, you tell him: ‘Now, you have to go […] to the HIV Clinic to get the treatment’. As soon as you speak of […] the AIDS programme, he or she does not want the treatment anymore. […] The mere fact of going…going towards these buildings, […] the person that goes inside, he thinks to himself: ‘Well, that’s it, if I get in there, I will be labelled as…as an AIDS patient’. (NGO-7)

The involvement of members of the global health network on HIV and their attempts to prevent discriminations against people living with viral hepatitis, in some settings, could result in inducing them.

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Finally, members of the global health network on HIV impacted not only researchers and activists but also health policymakers in the response to viral hepatitis. The example of the “Test & Treat” public health approach is quite telling. To address HIV, “Test and Treat” makes sense as treating people living with HIV as soon as possible has two major benefits: it gives a better prognosis to the patients and prevents the virus from spreading further. It was transferred from HIV to viral hepatitis15 but in the case of HBV, treating is not as systematic as for HIV or HCV. Only 10–40% of people infected with chronic hepatitis B need treatment and it is very hard to know who to treat and when to treat. To this date, this is the most difficult question in the management of hepatitis B, but by only focusing on the importance of screening (“Test”), and access to treatment (“Treat”), this public health approach renders this issue invisible.

Notes 1. Anonymous quotes were collected between February 2017 and June 2018. 46 semi-structured interviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed. Interviewees are quoted with reference to their category of institutional affiliation: international organizations (IO), non-governmental organizations (NGO) and research institutions (Research). 2. https://patrimoine.univ-tours.fr/collections-sonores/faculte-de-med ecine/philippe-bagros/entretien-documents-philippe-bagros-390818. kjsp?RH=1386601607892, accessed on January 26, 2020. This interview was conducted by Masters’ students of Tours University. All quotes and documents translated from French to English in the chapter are translated by me. 3. This belief was still true for hepatitis B more than thirty-five years after the test of the vaccine as one can see is the following quote: “You know, even today, we gathered a working group on hepatitis B […] but we don’t really know what to do. I mean, there is a solution that is so simple that is vaccination, so you just want to say: ‘the only problem is to vaccinate everyone, all the babies’.” (Research-3) 4. https://patrimoine.univ-tours.fr/collections-sonores/philippe-maupas/ pierre-coursaget/entretiens-documents-pierre-coursaget-567012.kjsp? RH=1486980570303, accessed on February 8, 2020. This interview was conducted by Masters’ students of Tours University. 5. This is not specific to HBV, countless researchers, scientists, and medical doctors turned to HIV after 1981. However, it was particularly easy, for virologists who used to focus on HBV, to be perceived as having scientific legitimacy to study HIV.

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6. Later, the concept of “double burden of diseases” emerged, to describe the situation of countries where noncommunicable diseases were on the rise without witnessing a significant decrease of infectious diseases. However, this did not lead to a reassessment of Omran’s theory, those countries were simply considered as having an “incomplete epidemiological transition.” 7. Many HIV/AIDS specialists interviewed in 2017 and 2018, declared that, compared to HIV, hepatitis B was “complicated”—despite the facts that there are technical solutions such as a vaccine and a lifelong treatment for hepatitis B (and that HIV/AIDS is known as one of the most complicated infectious diseases of all time because it attacks the immune system). There is no vaccine for HIV, the treatment is also lifelong, yet those interviewees perceived it as simpler than hepatitis B because they knew it better. They often explained that, for hepatitis B, unlike HIV, not everybody needed the treatment, so they did not know who to treat or what to do. In fact, one single research project on hepatitis B in Sub-Saharan Africa—the PROLIFICA project, that started in 2011—was enough to answer most of those questions. 8. The involvement of other actors in this process, including many scientists who were advocates of grouping all viral hepatitis together to raise their visibility, has been discussed elsewhere (de Seze 2020, pp. 196–203). 9. The main steps of the construction of viral hepatitis as a global health problem have been described elsewhere (de Seze 2020, in particular Chapters 6 and 7). Here, we only focus on the impact of this global problem—and the responses to address it—on one of the five health issues framed within its range: hepatitis B. 10. The process of framing several health issues into one global problem to increase their visibility at the global level is not specific to viral hepatitis. Another famous example in global health is “Neglected Tropical Diseases” that regroup twenty diseases with shared characteristics. To a certain extent, the promotion of “Non-Communicable Diseases” in global health, as a massive global problem not only for high-income countries but for all, was also a similar process. 11. “Prevention and Control of Viral Hepatitis Infection: Framework for Global Action” (in 2012) and “Global policy report on the prevention and control of viral hepatitis in WHO member states” (in 2013). 12. “3 by 5” was an initiative launched by WHO between 2003 and 2005 to give access to antiretrovirals to three million people living with HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries. 13. There is a very clear figure to explain that phenomenon (and the biomarker behind it) in a 2009 paper published in the journal Cancer Letters by Gouas, Shi, and Hainaut, titled: “The aflatoxin-induced TP53

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mutation at codon 249 (R249S): biomarker of exposure, early detection and target for therapy” (vol. 286, issue 1, pp. 29–37). 14. See the article from Turner and colleagues published in 2005 in the Lancet and titled “Reduction in exposure to carcinogenic aflatoxins by postharvest intervention measures in west Africa: a community-based intervention study” (vol. 365, issue 9475, pp. 1950–1956). 15. In his message to celebrate World Hepatitis Day in July 2019, WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, declared that “testing and treatment as a public health approach remains the most neglected aspect of the response [to viral hepatitis].”

References Bayer, R. (1991). Public health policy and the AIDS epidemic. New England Journal of Medicine, 324(21), 1500–1504. Brown, T. M., Cueto, M., & Fee, E. (2006). The world health organization and the transition from ‘international’ to ‘global’ public health. American Journal of Public Health, 96(1), 62–72. David, P.-M. (2011). La santé : un enjeu de plus en plus central dans les politiques publiques de développement international? Socio-logos. http://journals. openedition.org/socio-logos/2550. Accessed 2 April 2020. de Seze, M. (2020). Health policymaking between West Africa and WHO: The construction of viral hepatitis as a global problem and the responses to hepatitis B in Senegal and The Gambia. Paris: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne; The University of Sheffield. Fidler, D. P. (1997). The globalization of public health: Emerging infectious diseases and international relations. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 5(1), 11–51. Forman, L. (2011). Global AIDS funding and the re-emergence of AIDS ‘exceptionalism’. Social Medicine, 6(1), 45–51. Gilbert, C., & Henry, E. (2009). Comment se construisent les problèmes de santé publique. Paris: La Découverte. Greenwood, B. (2014). The contribution of vaccination to global health: Past, present and future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1645). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0433. Gusfield, J. R. (1989). Constructing the ownership of social problems: Fun and profit in the welfare state. Social Problems, 36(5), 431–441. Haas, P. M. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination. International Organization, 46(1), 1–35.

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Hilgartner, S., & Bosk, C. L. (1988). The rise and fall of social problems: A public arenas model. American Journal of Sociology, 94(1), 53–78. Hunsmann, M. (2012). Limits to evidence-based health policymaking: Policy hurdles to structural HIV prevention in Tanzania. Social Science and Medicine, 74(10), 1477–1485. Hunsmann, M. (2016). Pushing ‘global health’ out of its comfort zone: Lessons from the depoliticization of AIDS control in Africa. Development and Change, 47 (4), 798–817. Ingram, A. (2013). After the exception: HIV/AIDS beyond salvation and scarcity. Antipode, 45(2), 436–454. Kane, M. A. (1998). Status of hepatitis B immunization programmes in 1998. Vaccine, 16(11), 104–108. Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Koplan, J. P., Bond, C., Merson, M., Reddy, S., Rodriguez, M., Sewankambo, N., & Wasserheit, J. (2009). Towards a common definition of global health. The Lancet, 373(9679), 1993–1995. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-673 6(09)60332-9. Lee, K., Buse, K., & Fustukian, S. (2002). Health policy in a globalising world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lemoine, M., Girard, P.-M., Thursz, M., & Raguin, G. (2012). In the shadow of HIV/AIDS: Forgotten diseases in sub-Saharan Africa—Global health issues and funding agency responsibilities. Journal of Public Health Policy, 33(4), 430–438. Moulin, A.-M., Chabrol, F., & Ouvrier, A. (2018). Histoire d’un vaccin pas comme les autres : les premiers pas du vaccin contre l’hépatite B au Sénégal. In V. Delaunay, A. Desclaux, & C. Sokhna (Eds.), Niakhar, mémoires et perspectives. Recherches pluridisciplinaires sur le changement en Afrique (pp. 489–510). Marseilles: IRD; Dakar: L’Harmattan Sénégal. Muraskin, W. A. (1995). The war against Hepatitis B: A history of the international task force on Hepatitis B immunization. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Okwo-Bele, J.-M., & Cherian, T. (2011). The expanded programme on immunization: A lasting legacy of smallpox eradication. Vaccine, 29(12), 74–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.01.080. Oppenheimer, G. M., & Bayer, R. (2009). The rise and fall of AIDS exceptionalism. AMA Journal of Ethics, 11(12), 988–992. Parkhurst, J., & Hunsmann, M. (2015). Breaking out of Silos: The need for critical paradigm reflection in HIV prevention. Review of African Political Economy, 42(145), 477–487.

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Quissell, K., Berlan, D., Shiffman, J., & Walt, G. (2018). Explaining global network emergence and nonemergence: Comparing the processes of network formation for Tuberculosis and Pneumonia. Public Administration and Development, 38(4), 144–153. Reich, M. (1995). The politics of agenda setting in international health: Child health versus adult health in developing countries. Journal of International Development, 7 (3), 489–502. Reinicke, W. (1999). The other world wide web: Global public policy networks. Foreign Policy, 117 (4), 44. Robinson, P., & de Leeuw, E. (2015). Global health and international relations. Global Change, Peace & Security, 27 (3), 396–398. Shiffman, J. (2006a). Donor funding priorities for communicable disease control in the developing world. Health Policy and Planning, 21(6), 411–420. Shiffman, J. (2006b). HIV/AIDS and the rest of the global health agenda. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 84(12), 923. Shiffman, J. (2008). Has Donor prioritization of HIV/AIDS displaced aid for other health issues? Health Policy and Planning, 23(2), 95–100. Shiffman, J. (2009). A social explanation for the rise and fall of global health issues. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 87 (8), 608–613. Shiffman, J. (2016). Networks and global health governance: Introductory editorial for health policy and planning supplement on the emergence and effectiveness of global health networks. Health Policy and Planning, 31(1), i1–i2. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czw019. Shiffman, J., Berlan, D., & Hafner, T. (2009). Has aid for AIDS raised all health funding boats? Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, 52(11), 45–48. Shiffman, J., Quissell, K., Schmitz, H.-P., Pelletier, D., Smith, S., … Rodriguez, M. (2015). A framework on the emergence and effectiveness of global health networks. Health Policy and Planning. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/ czu046. Shiffman, J., & Smith, S. (2007). Generation of political priority for global health initiatives: A framework and case study of maternal mortality. Lancet, 370(9595), 1370–1379. Smith, J., Ahmed, K., & Whiteside, A. (2011). Why HIV/AIDS should be treated as exceptional: Arguments from Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe. African Journal of AIDS Research, 10(1), 345–356. https://doi. org/10.2989/16085906.2011.637736.

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Stone, D. A. (1989). Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas. Political Science Quarterly, 104(2), 281–300. https://doi.org/10.2307/2151585. WHO. (2016). Global health sector strategy on viral hepatitis, 2016–2021. https://www.who.int/hepatitis/strategy2016-2021/ghss-hep/en/.

CHAPTER 4

Issue Competition in a Globalized World: The Causes of Cross-National Similarities and Differences in the Issue Content of Party Politics Christoffer Green-Pedersen

Political attention is one of the key ingredients of politics. The most classical works within political science such as Schattschneider (1960) and Bachrach and Baratz (1962) outlined the crucial role of agenda setting as the political process that allocates political attention to different political issues. Despite the long-time political science interest both theoretical and empirically in the distribution of political attention within political systems, cross-national comparisons of issue attention are actually quite limited in number. This is especially true when moving beyond studies of particular issues and into the political agenda in general. We actually know surprisingly little about how different or similar political agendas are across countries. Are there some issues that receive a high level of

C. Green-Pedersen (B) Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_4

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political attention in all countries? Or are some political issues dominant in one country, but completely absent from the political agenda in other countries? Despite the quite extensive literature that has emerged around policy agenda setting in recent years (See Baumgartner, Jones, & Mortensen, 2017), we actually know surprisingly little about such questions. The question about cross-national differences and similarities in political agendas is important for several reasons. If political agendas are nationally quite distinct in their issues content, it points to the drivers of political attention being nationally distinct. If political agendas are quite similar across countries, it indicates that the drivers of political attention are also quite similar across political system. Or even further that the drivers are super-national in the forms of international organization or policy problems that are international in character such as climate change. In an increasingly globalized world, this latter question about international drivers of national agendas is of course highly relevant to ask. If national political agendas are de facto set by international developments, this would be a serious testimony to the importance of globalization. It would indicate that the very starting point of political decision-making, the political agenda, is set by forces outside of the political system. However, the question is if this is in fact what is happening. Further, agenda setting is intimately related to the construction of social problems. Therefore, it is worth relating the discussion about cross-national differences and similarities in the issue content of political agendas and the role of globalization to the literature on the construction of social problems, which has a parallel discussion (cf. Benson & Saguy, 2005; Neveu, 2017). This chapter zooms in on the party political agenda in seven West European countries (UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands). The party political agenda is of course only one possible and relevant political agenda to analyze. However, despite differences in political systems, primarily electoral systems, party politics is the dominant political venue in all these seven countries and therefore relevant to focus on (cf. Green-Pedersen & Wolfe, 2009). Still, in conclusion it is worth considering whether this agenda is likely to be more or less affected by globalization than other political venues. The chapter proceeds in two steps. The first step is theoretical and discusses different drivers of party political agendas in terms of whether they are most likely to generate cross-national differences or crossnational similarities in party agendas. The different drivers discussed are

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the ones developed in the quite extensive literature on policy agenda setting and issue competition. These can broadly be grouped into four groups: problem indicators, issue characteristics, party competition, and coalition politics. These factors have all been shown to matter for party political agendas within national political systems. Here they will be discussed in terms of whether they are likely to generate cross-national difference or similarities. The second party is empirical. Here the chapter analyzes party political agendas in the seven West European countries from 1980 onwards.1 This empirical part provides some first answers to the question about cross-national differences and similarities in party political agendas.

Policy Agenda Setting in Comparative Perspective In 1976, Cobb, Ross & Ross published the Article “Agenda Building as a Comparative Political Process” in the American Political Science Review that highlighted how suitable the study of agenda setting processes is to a comparative approach (1976, p. 126). However, surprisingly few studies have followed up on this implicit call for more comparative studies—in the sense of cross-national comparisons—made 40 years ago. Within the booming research environment around the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) (cf. Baumgartner, Breunig, & Grossman, 2019; Green-Pedersen & Walgrave, 2014) comparative studies have become more widespread, but far from typical. Further, comparative studies within this tradition are often “issue blind.” Studies like Mortensen et al. (2011) focus on investigating the effects of particular factors for agenda setting dynamics, in this case the color of governments across a number of countries. A number of recent studies within policy agenda setting have also focused on “issue diversity,” i.e., whether attention is concentrated on few issues or spread out across more issues (Greene, 2016), or on agenda stability (Bevan & Greene, 2018). Further, the studies by Baumgartner et al. (2009) and Jones et al. (2009) both show the importance of the different degrees of “friction” in political systems or at different stages of the political process for how changes in attention are distributed. Political systems or stages in the political process with high levels of friction are characterized by more punctuated changes in attention, i.e., changes are either very small or quite dramatic. In all these types of studies, issues are in reality “functional equivalents.” The purpose is not to understand whether one issue

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rather than another gets attention, but rather to understand for instance the way attention changes. Two agendas with substantially very different issue content, i.e., different issues get high/low levels of attention, may exhibit the same dynamics of change. However, a core claim of the whole policy agenda setting tradition is that attention is consequential. The political process around a particular issue changes when political attention changes. The attitudes of the electorate for instance become more important when political attention increases (Mortensen, 2010), Thus treating issues as “functional equivalents” can be seen as contradictory to the very reasons for studying political attention. At least it is clear that understanding cross-national similarities and differences in the issue content of political agendas is important because the content of the political agenda matters for policy developments. What has emerged in the recent decade or so are cross-national studies of attention to particular issues like immigration (Green-Pedersen & Otjes, 2019); the environment (Breeman & Timmermans, 2019) or health care (Green-Pedersen & Wilkerson, 2006).2 However, agendas are typically analyzed in terms of around 20 different policy issues, so analyzing just one issue tells us quite little about the broader issue content of the agenda. Thus, despite the boom in studies of policy agenda setting in recent years it actually remains an open question whether countries in fact have rather similar or different political agendas. Zooming in on one political agenda, namely the party political one, the good news, however, is that the extensive literature on policy agenda setting as well as the literature on issue competition among political parties have shown the importance of a number of factors for the agenda setting process. Thus, there is substantial knowledge about the drivers of party political attention that can form the basis for formulating theoretical arguments about drivers of cross-national similarities and differences in party political attention. Problem Indicators and Focusing Events One factor that clearly matters for agenda setting process in general, as well as party political agendas, is how policy problems develop, or more precisely how problem indicators develop. Information is an intrinsic element of politics and therefore problem indicators are a central driver of political attention (Baumgartner & Jones, 2015). Policy agenda setting

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is by no means a process where political actors respond rationally to the most important problems out there, but as Stone (1997) pointed out, once policy problems are measured and indicators are developed, such indicators easily come to play a central role in agenda setting. There are very often political actors like political parties or interest groups who have a strong interest in generating more attention to a given issue and therefore are very likely to try to take advantage of for instance problem indicators that show worsening policy problems. The development of problem indicators can thus be the perfect ammunition for actors wanting to draw more attention to an issue. The next question then is whether the development of problem indicators are a source of cross-national difference or similarities in political agendas. The short answer is that it depends on the development of the indicators. However, there are good reasons to believe that they develop in relative parallel ways, at least when focusing on advanced industrialized societies. Modern economies are highly integrated which implies that economic cycles and thus economic indicators are likely to develop in relatively parallel fashions. The economic crisis following the financial crisis in the late 2000s is a clear example of this. Another example would be the similar challenges that all modern healthcare systems face. Unlike other policy areas where technological advances lead to decreased costs, technological advances imply constant problem pressures on healthcare systems. It is hard for any politicians to deny citizens access to the most advanced treatments and technology but at the same time, politicians need to control costs and the results are easily waiting lists, unequal access to the latest treatments, etc. (Green-Pedersen & Wilkerson, 2006). Another example is how all advanced industrial countries have also gone through a process of de-industrialization and the emergence of the “knowledge economy.” This process has put the focus on the importance of educational performance and indicators like PISA scores have come to play a central political role in some countries. This has increased political attention to education (cf. Green-Pedersen 2019a, pp. 135–152). As agenda setting drivers, the development of the problem indicators is thus likely to lead to relatively similar party political agendas across advanced industrialized countries. Political attention to issues like education and health care will for instance increase across advanced industrialized countries (cf. Green-Pedersen, 2019a, pp. 135–168). As will be discussed below, this does by no means imply that political parties respond to problem indicators in a non-political way. Several political factors shape

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how much political attention actually emerge and during which periods. However, when looking at the development of political attention over decades, such indicators will lead to parallel developments in the content of party agendas across West European countries. The picture will be one of the local manifestations of similar societal developments. Of course, there are also problem indicators that are more international in nature and where national agenda setting processes are much more likely to be interwoven. Climate change is a clear example. Not that there is no national agenda setting process around climate change, but in terms of problem indicators and also possible solutions this is a problem that is much more international in nature. International institutions are also likely to play a more direct role in national agenda setting processes. The discussion of how problem indicators and their development influence party attention resembles the study of how social problems are constructed, which has a long tradition within sociology including a journal on the topic, Social Problems. This literature has clearly shown how actors struggle with each other over how social problems should be constructed. Questions about cross-national differences in problem construction have also been investigated, typically highlighting the role of such factors as national politics and culture in leading to cross-national differences in problem construction (e.g., Benson & Saguy, 2005; Saguy, Gruys, & Gong, 2010, p. 604). The increased globalized world adds a new dimension to this debate as actors for instance may adopt constructions from other countries (Neveu, 2017). Such social problems literature will typically emphasize cross-national variation rather than cross-national similarities. Related to problem indicators are focusing on events (Birkland, 1997). Significant and unforeseen events can be important drivers of political attention. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 is perhaps the most prominent example and has been shown to lead to a general increase in attention to the environment across West European countries (Abou-Chadi, 2016; Green-Pedersen, 2019a, pp. 116–134). This disaster got huge international attention and this may also be the case with other focusing events in other countries. Still, this depends on the existence of national actors with an interest in using a focusing event to generate more attention. The Fukushima disaster in 2011 had a much varying political impact than the Chernobyl disaster. In some countries like France, it was seen as just a foreign event (Arnhold, in this book) whereas in countries like Germany it became an important event for the national political debate about nuclear

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energy. The latter was typically the case when strong political resistance to nuclear energy was already present (Bernadi, Morales, Lühiste, & Bishof, 2018).

Issue Characteristics The next factor that the literature on policy agenda setting has identified as an important driver of political agendas in general are issue characteristics. The role of issue characteristics was central in policy agenda setting classics such as Cobb and Elder (1983) and Baumgartner and Jones (1993, pp. 150–172). Theoretically, the discussion of issue characteristics has often centered around the construction of issue typologies as an attempt to theorize which issue characteristics matter. However, as argued by Grossmann (2012) the search for the right typology has not been very successful. The classification of issues into the various categories of the suggested typologies is simply too much open to interpretation. However, there is no doubt that issue characteristics matter for agenda setting. Grossmann (2012) argues that instead of focusing on generating typologies, one should focus on issue characteristics that are generally important for agenda setting dynamics and how individual issues deviate from them. To take health care as an example, important issue characteristics from an agenda setting perspective are the broad scope of the issue—health care is a relevant issue for everyone—and that health care is of central importance to everyone. Health care is ultimately about life and death and therefore not just something that is relevant, but something everyone cares deeply about. Health being a very central issue for the entire population is thus a central characteristic in agenda setting processes. No political actor including political parties can ignore healthcare concerns. Further, health care has increasingly been characterized by an endless stream of technological innovations. As argued above, this puts political parties under pressure and translates into increasing political attention to health care across advanced industrialized countries (Green-Pedersen, 2019a, pp. 153–168; Green-Pedersen & Wilkerson, 2006). Thus, issue characteristics often interact with various problem indicators in shaping agenda setting. Issue characteristics are typically invariant over time, but they become important when problem indicators change. It is exactly because

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of the characteristics of health care such as broad scope and high importance for individuals that for instance waiting lists to hospital treatments is an important driver of political attention to health care. Questions about the scope of issues like health care may of course also be open to social construction. Issues can be made relevant to everyone. However, the core of the focus on issue characteristics within policy agenda setting theory is that issues due to their policy nature have characteristics that are not easily politically reconstructed and therefore come to play a more permanent role in politics. From this perspective, health care is not easily reconstructed as an issue that is not relevant to everyone. In terms of cross-national differences and similarities, issue characteristics are an important source of cross-national similarities in political attention. That health care has a broad scope and high personal importance is important everywhere. Thus, issue characteristics are a factor that is likely to generate parallel trends in political attention. Political actors in any two countries are likely to pay more attention to health care due to the challenges emerging from technological developments, not because actors in other countries pay more attention. Electoral Appeals When focusing on party attention, another central factor that has been identified as driving attention is the vote-maximizing incentives of political parties. Any political party needs vote and the quite extensive literature on issue competition (Budge & Farlie, 1983; Carmines, 1991) argues that a central strategy to obtain votes is to try to shape party political attention in a direction that is favorable toward one’s party. A central assumption of issue competition is thus that political parties have issues they prefer to other issues because they believe that more attention to these issues will benefit them rather than their opponents. The most common understanding of which issues are favorable to political parties is the notion of issue-ownership (Budge, 2015; Walgrave, Lefevere, & Tresch, 2015). The electorate sees a certain party as more competent than another party in dealing with a certain issue. This makes it attractive for the party to try to draw attention to this issue. The idea of issue competition based on issue-ownership easily leads to the idea that parties talk past each other and only focus on their favorable issues. However, there is considerable evidence that parties do in fact enter into dialogue with each and address similar issues, i.e., also issues they would rather avoid

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(Dolezal, Ennser-Jedenastik, Müller, & Winkler, 2013; Green-Pedersen & Mortensen, 2010; Sigelman & Buell, 2004). The literature on issue competition has also shown that different types of political parties behave differently. The most widespread distinction is between mainstream and niche parties (Meguid, 2005; Wagner, 2012). The first group of parties are the typical large parties in terms of seats like the Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, and Conservative/Liberal parties that have dominated West European governments in the postwar period. The second group of parties are the new parties like Green and radical right-wing parties that have emerged with a strong focus on specific issues like the environment and immigration. Whereas mainstream parties typically appeal to voters by having broad and flexible issue focus, niche parties stay strongly focused on the issues that are their “raison d’être.” Following up on the distinction between mainstream and niche parties, a number of studies have also investigated whether the electoral success of niche parties affect attention to the issues that niche parties focus on (Abou-Chadi, 2016; Green-Pedersen & Otjes, 2019; Meguid, 2005; Spoon, Hobolt, & De Vries, 2014). The results are somewhat varying, but the major tendency is for the success of niche parties to generate more attention in general to the core issues of niche parties. The question then is whether issue competition generates crossnational similarities or differences in party attention? There are dynamics within party competition that would point in different directions, but the overall tendency would be in the direction of relatively similar patterns of issue attention. All party systems have, at least until recently been dominated by mainstream parties which have a strong incentive to appeal broadly to the electorate. Seeberg (2017) has also shown that there are broad cross-national similarities in how the electorate in Western Europe views the issue competences of mainstream parties. They typically consider the left best at handling welfare-state related issues and the environment and the right best at handling the economy, immigration, and crime. Thus, the electoral incentives in terms of issue competition that mainstream parties face across West European countries are actually relatively similar and this is an important source of cross-national similarities in issue attention. Electoral incentives may, however, also lead to divergence in party attention. Whereas the central role of mainstream parties has, at least until recently, been a dominant feature of all West European countries, the emergence of niche parties, or more precisely their success has been

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more varying. This is not least a consequence of differences in the electoral system, the UK being the classical example of an electoral system making it very hard for niche parties to establish themselves in parliament. The electoral threshold for entering parliament is also of great importance for the opportunities of niche parties. In the Netherlands, where there is no threshold, beyond winning a seat, niche parties like pensioner’s parties (50PLUS and Union 55+) have established themselves in parliament together with for instance the Party for the Animals (PVDD). In countries like Sweden, where the electoral threshold is 4%, niche parties have struggled to get into the parliament and thus play a role in electoral competition. For instance, the Sweden Democrats gained 2.9% in the 2006 election and the Feminist Initiative 3.1% in 2014. To the extent that mainstream parties do respond to the success of niche parties by paying more attention to their core issues, their varying opportunities for success are a source of cross-national differences in party attention. Coalition Incentives The studies of party attention discussed above are all based on the assumption that vote-seeking is the motivation of mainstream parties. However, a perhaps even more central motivation for these parties is to have government power. They of course also need votes, but they are often willing to sacrifice some votes to gain government power. In some cases like the UK one, the best way to gain government power is to maximize vote-share, but in many other West European countries coalition politics is a central element of gaining government power. As argued by Green-Pedersen (2019b), coalition dynamics can be a central driver of party attention and lead to a difference in the party attention. One example is the differences in party attention to immigration in Denmark and Sweden (Green-Pedersen & Krogstrup, 2008). Despite Sweden having a higher number of immigrants, Denmark has seen considerably more party attention to immigration than Sweden. The reasons should be found in the different coalition incentives facing the mainstream right in Denmark and Sweden. In Denmark in the 1990s, the mainstream right parties had a realistic opportunity of gaining a majority in parliament with the radical right and without the Social Liberals that are left-wing on immigration. This made it attractive for the mainstream right to focus on immigration. In Sweden on the other hand, the mainstream right, the Conservatives (Moderaterne) had no realistic chance of

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governing with the radical right. Right-wing governments in Sweden have only been realistic when the mainstream right has worked closely with the three right-wing oriented center parties, the Centre Party, The Liberals, and the Christian Democrats. As especially the Centre Party and the Liberals are more left-wing-oriented in terms of immigration, a strategy with more focus on immigration has until now not been attractive for the Swedish Conservatives in terms of winning government power. Similar or Different Party Agendas? Summing up across the four drivers of political attention discussed here, problem indicators, issue characteristics, electoral competition, and coalition politics, the question is whether we should expect party agendas with different or similar issue content across countries. The theoretical discussion above provided arguments for both similarities and differences. However, when looking across the drivers, similarities seem a stronger expectation than differences. There are two main reasons for this. The one reason is that West European countries encounter relatively similar societal developments in terms of the development of for instance the economy, the labor market, and healthcare technological developments. Thus, in terms of problem indicators, West European countries face a relatively similar context from an agenda setting perspective. The other is that politics in West European countries share similar features that imply that they will react in parallel to similar developments in problem indicators. Issue characteristics are one important driver of party attention that is similar across countries. Another is that large mainstream parties play a central role in all West European countries and they, at least from a vote-seeking perspective, typically evaluate issues similarly. The sources of cross-national differences are less pronounced and to a large extent boil down to the extent to which the political system is open to a large number of parties including new, niche parties. New niche parties may by themselves influence the vote-seeking strategies of the mainstream parties. They may also influence the coalition incentives of the mainstream parties and this can also affect party political attention. Altogether, the theoretical overview would lead to similarities in the party agenda as being more pronounced than the differences. It is important to be aware that this expectation implies that party political agenda setting in West European countries should be seen as a parallel process, not as an interweaved process where parties in one

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country pay attention to issues because parties in another country do so. Such a diffusion process has been argued by Böhmelt, Ezrow, Lehrer, and Ward (2016) to take place with regard to party positions. Parties are argued to respond to the left-right positions taken by foreign incumbent parties. However, it is difficult to see the incentives for parties in one country to pay attention to issues simply because parties in other countries do so. Political parties can learn from parties in other countries about policy solutions, arguments, and framing, but in terms of which issues to focus on, it is difficult to see what parties learn from seeing parties in other countries paying more or less attention to an issue.

How Have Party Agendas in Western Europe Developed? In the following, we analyze the issue content of party agendas in seven West European countries (UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark) from 1980 onward. The data source is party manifestos coded according to the CAP coding scheme (Bevan, 2019). This coding allows for a detailed investigation of how party attention to different policy issues has developed from a comparative perspective. The CAP coding scheme contains around 220 sub-topics, which were then merged into 23 main topics or policy issues (Green-Pedersen, 2019b). Party manifestos are published by political parties at the beginning of elections campaigns, but the use of them as data source does not imply that the aim is to study campaign agendas. Rather party manifestos are useful because parties usually take a step back from the daily attention in especially news media and present their issue agenda. Party manifestos are thus useful for tracking medium or long-term developments in party attention to policy issues. Analyzing the development of issue attention to 23 issues is not possible within a book chapter. Green-Pedersen (2019a) further presents a more detailed analysis of how party attention has developed. The following will therefore only provide information on some issues that typically attract a large of the total party attention. Macro-economic issues like inflation, government budgets, and unemployment have traditionally been top issues in West European party politics.3 Figure 4.1 shows how party attention to macro-economic issues has developed in the seven countries.4 The figure shows a generally quite

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Fig. 4.1 Party attention to macro-economic issues 1980–2015

similar picture across the seven countries. Macro-economic issues have been a declining part of party politics in the countries. This development is most pronounced in Denmark and Sweden, where party attention to macro-economic issues was very high in the 1980s. Germany is the exception as attention to macro-economic issues has been more stable. France is the only country where the financial crisis seems to have led to increasing attention to macro-economic issues again. This may reflect high levels of unemployment in the aftermath of the economic crisis. Unemployment has generally been found to be a problem indicator which has a strong impact on party attention (Otjes & Green-Pedersen, 2019). Figure 4.2 shows attention to the environment from 1980s onward. Like in relation to macro-economics, there are striking cross-national similarities. At the beginning of the 1980s, some countries like Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands already had high levels of attention to the environment which peaked in the late 1980s. In other countries, attention grew throughout the 1980s and then, with the exception of Denmark, peaked in the 1990s. After that attention to the environment has dropped

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Fig. 4.2 Party attention to the environment 1980–2015

to a lower level, but still receives significant party attention in all countries. Part of the explanation for this development should be found in the development of environmental problems. In the 1980s, environmental problems were generally at a higher level in the seven countries and the period also saw significant focus events like the Chernobyl disaster. Since then, the state of the environment has generally improved, though this depends significantly on which aspects of the environment one focuses on (Jahn, 2016, pp. 132–154). Figure 4.3 shows attention to health care. All seven countries have seen health care play an increasingly important role in party politics. The explanation should be found in the interaction between the issue characteristic of health care and medical technological development. Health care is a valence issue affecting the whole population in a significant way. Medical technological development has generated increasing opportunities for detecting and treating diseases leading to among other things increasing life-expectancy. This puts any health care system under financial pressure, but also political pressure. Given the characteristics of the

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Fig. 4.3 Attention to health care in seven countries 1980–2015

healthcare issue, it is tempting for political parties to promise the population unlimited access to recent medical technological innovations, but this just exacerbates the financial pressure. The countries that have seen the biggest rise in party attention are generally those that have national healthcare systems (UK, Denmark, and Sweden) where challenges to healthcare system more easily become a matter for national politicians (Green-Pedersen, 2019a, pp. 153–168). Finally, Fig. 4.4 shows the development of party attention to crime and justice. Here the picture has also been one of generally increasing party attention into the 2000s where it with the exception of Denmark has leveled off or declined. Again, there is also cross-national variation in the general pattern. Belgium is the country that have seen the highest level of attention to crime and justice due to the Dutroux scandals from 1996 to 1998 (Walgrave & Varone, 2008). Looking beyond the four issues discussed above, the picture for most issues is the same as above, namely one of a generally similar development with some cross-national variation. For instance, attention to immigration

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Fig. 4.4 Party system attention to crime and justice in seven countries 1980– 2015

has generally increased, but Denmark sticks out with high levels of party attention to immigration (Green-Pedersen & Otjes, 2019). The question is what this tells us about the drivers of party attention and similarities across countries. In many ways, this is a story about “parallel processes.” As argued by Green-Pedersen (2019a), the key to understanding what drives party attention to issues is the incentives large, mainstream parties like Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, or Conservative parties face and they are typically quite similar across countries. They are partly shaped by issue characteristics including problem information, which are typically similar for all parties, and partly by issue-ownership considerations. The latter also shows quite similar patterns across countries (Seeberg, 2017). The major source of cross-national variation is coalition considerations. When discussing West European countries, the role of the European Union deserves some special attention. The European Union can affect national party political agendas in two ways; first by being an issue in itself, i.e., a question relating to the organization of the European Union as a polity on its own. This involves questions relating to the EU institutions

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and questions about membership. There are examples of this playing a large role in party politics, but the general pattern (see Green-Pedersen, 2019a, pp. 99–113) is that the European Union itself has not been a central issue in party competition. Second, the EU has taken over significant competence in a policy area. One expectation would be that this would lead to the disappearance of the issues from the national political agendas. Both Breeman & Timmermans (2019) and Princen (2009) analyze this and find no clear pattern that national attention disappears with increased EU competence. If anything Breeman and Timmermans (2019) find that with regard to the environment EU attention is correlated with more national attention, but this is only the case in some countries. Thus, the transfer of authority to the European Union does not have a strong and clear impact on national party agendas. The European Union rarely becomes a central issue on its own, and on specific issues granting European authority on an issue does not seem to have a clear impact on national political attention.

Agenda Setting in a Globalized World In conclusion, it is important to understand the nature of the similarities found in party issue attention. The issues analyzed above are broad issue categories. Below this level of aggregation, there is a lot of room for crossnational variation in which specific policy questions are addressed. Within health care, for instance, the nature of the healthcare system will shape the exact content of the attention. A partly private insurance system like the United States one will generate attention to the different policy questions than a national healthcare system like the Danish one (Green-Pedersen & Wilkerson, 2006). Specific policy questions can also get a similar level of attention but be discussed in fundamentally different ways as comparative studies of problem construction have shown (Benson & Saguy, 2005; Saguy et al., 2010, p. 604). However, the similarities in the broader issue content of party politics are important because issues are different. Even if healthcare problems are debated in different ways, it matters that health care rather than transportation or foreign policy gets the attention of political parties. Pointing out these broad trends in attention dynamics is one of the major insights emerging from looking at attention dynamics from a policy agenda setting perspective. The rich literature on the construction and definition of social problems discussed above is completely right in pointing out that within such broad trends, there is

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considerable room for cross-national variation in how problems related to for instance health are actually constructed and debated. However, the fact that healthcare problems rather than housing problems gets attentions is crucial and easily overlooked when the construction of specific social problems is not placed in a larger agenda context. Focus above has been on the party political agenda and this raises the question of whether the party political agendas are the most or least likely case for being “globalized.” Compared to for instance the media agenda, an argument could be made that the party political agenda is the least likely case. When information flows become international due to modern means of communication, the media agenda may also become international to the extent that this follows from the journalistic criteria of newsworthiness that drive the media agenda. The party political agenda is driven by party competition dynamics that are more national in nature. Parties relate to competing parties and to the electorate, but these are both national in nature. From this perspective, the party political agenda is probably the least likely case for being “globalized.” However, it continues to be perhaps the most important political agenda in most countries. The argument presented above that party political agenda setting should be understood as parallel processes generating relatively similar patterns of issue attention across countries should further not be taken as an argument that countries, in this case West European countries, are not interweaved both political and socially. The spread of healthcare technology across advanced industrialized countries is a clear example of how technology is diffused across countries giving rise to similar political challenges. However, the agenda setting process is national because political parties are in national competition with each other. Further, it is important to be aware that countries are much more likely to look to each other, the further down the policy process one goes. If political parties want to deliver solutions to specific policy problems, looking cross-nationally is quite attractive. As discussed above there are issues like climate change where cross-national agenda-diffusion is more likely because the problems are not national in the same way as the healthcare system is. On this issue, focusing events and problem indicators are also to a large extent the same across countries.

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Notes 1. The empirical material in the book draws on Green-Pedersen (2019a). 2. Jennings et al. (2011) also focus more on the substance of the political agenda by studying attention to “core issues” like the economy and international affairs, but the notion of core issues covers a quite broad range of issues. 3. In the CAP codebook (Bevan, 2019) macro-economic issues refer to the subtopics in the 100 category and some sub-topics from the 1800 category. 4. For each country an unweighted average for all relevant parties at the election has been calculated (cf. Green-Pedersen, 2019a). The graph presented is based on Lowess smoothing with a 0.8 bandwidth. This smoothing is done in order to focus on the trends in the data rather than the individual observations.

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Green-Pedersen, C., & Walgrave, S. (2014). Agenda setting, policies, and political systems. A comparative approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green-Pedersen, C., & Wilkerson, J. (2006). How agenda-setting attributes shape politics: Basic Dilemmas, problem attention and health politics developments in Denmark and the US. Journal of European Public Policy, 13(7), 1039–1052. Green-Pedersen, C., & Wolfe, M. (2009). The hare and the tortoise once again. The institutionalization of environmental attention in the US and Denmark. Governance, 22(4), 625–646. Grossmann, M. (2012). The variable politics of the policy process: Issue-area differences and comparative networks. The Journal of Politics, 75(1), 65–79. Jahn, D. (2016). The politics of environmental performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jennings, W., et al. (2011). The effects of core functions of government on the diversity of executive agendas. Comparative Political Studies, 44, 1001–1030. Jones, B., Baumgartner, F. R., Breunig, C., Wlezien, C., Soroka, S., Foucault, M., … Mo, P. B. (2009). A general empirical law of public budgets: A comparative analysis. American Journal of Political Science, 53(4), 855–873. Meguid, B. (2005). The role of mainstream party strategy in Niche party success. American Political Science Review, 99(3), 347–359. Mortensen, P. B. (2010). Political attention and public policy: A study of how agenda setting matters. Scandinavian Political Studies, 33(4), 356–380. Mortensen, P. B., Green-Pedersen, C., Breeman, G., Bonafont Chaques, L., Jennings, W., John, P., …Timmermans, A. (2011). Comparing government agendas: Executive speeches in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Denmark. Comparative Political Studies, 44(8), 973–1000. Neveu, E. (2017). How do social problems and social conflicts travel across borders? Journal of Conflict and Integration, 1(1), 8–38. Otjes, S., & Green-Pedersen, C. (2019). When do parties prioritize labour? Issue attention between party competition and interest group war. Party politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068819875605. Princen, S. (2009). Agenda-setting in the European union. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Saguy, A., Gruys, K., & Gong, S. (2010). Social problem construction and national context: News reporting on “overweight” and “obesity” in the United States and France. Social Problems, 57 (4), 586–610. Schattschneider, E. (1960). The semisovereign people. New York: Hold, Rinehart, and Winston. Seeberg‚ H. B. (2016). How Stable Is Political Parties’ Issue Ownership? A CrossTime, Cross-National Analysis. Political Studies‚ 65(2)‚ 475–492.

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CHAPTER 5

Field Theory and the Foundations of Agenda Setting and Social Constructionism Models: Explaining Media Influence on French Mad Cow Disease Policy Jérémie Nollet

This chapter stems from the question: how are media-oriented decisions produced? Both agenda setting theory and social problems theory aim to show how the attention that the media give to certain events and topics feeds into public policies. Both theories make a fundamental heuristic contribution: that of denaturalizing this link. Both theories point out that the link between media coverage and public policy is not an invariable causality: the former only influences the latter if certain social and historical conditions are met. However, they still leave questions unanswered, especially when it comes to problems which not only circulate from the media to public action, but also across national boundaries. In fact, they describe but do not explain: they show the link between media coverage

J. Nollet (B) Sciences-Po Toulouse, Toulouse, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_5

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of an issue and public policies, but do not analyze how the influence operates. This chapter makes use of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to offer an explanatory framework for the agenda setting and social problem models. There is no question of rejecting the contributions of the many works that use either paradigm, but rather of offering an integrative sociological framework that can explain the phenomena they describe and, in so doing, allow the two to work together. This chapter would like to defend the idea that, by not paying sufficient attention to social agents and their practices, agenda setting and social problems theories do not fully explain the social uses of the media by those who elaborate public decisions. Building on this, a second part outlines a sociological model of a media-oriented policy process, which is based on field theory and proposes a sociological explanation for agenda setting and problem-building processes. The third part applies this theoretical framework to analyze how the transnational problem of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or “mad cow disease,” was covered by the media and how this coverage was able to influence public policies in France (Nollet, 2010). Mad cow disease problem lasted almost 20 years, from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s. After a routine management phase, the disease escalated into a crisis in the spring of 1996, first in Great Britain and soon in several other European countries including France.1 The crisis can be described as a phase of media agenda setting and a reconstruction of the social problem (as a public health crisis rather than a veterinary problem). Some major political decisions in the management of the crisis—such as the French ban on British beef from March 1996 to October 2002 or the total prohibition on meat and bone meal (MBM) from November 2000—seem to have been dictated by the media coverage of mad cow disease rather than by actual technical needs.

Social World Theories Without Social Agents Agenda setting theory and social problems theory are helpful for describing some properties of the symbolic order, that is to say how problems are prioritized or defined in media, political, administrative (or other) arenas. But they do not contain all the analytical elements needed to explain how this symbolic order is reflected in public policy: they do

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not offer a theory of action that explains how and why political or administrative agents take the problems that have been consecrated or redefined by the media into account. Agenda Setting’s Implicit Theory of Action Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972) developed agenda setting theory in order to conceptualize the capacity of the media to impose their definition of electoral issues on voters. At the same time, Roger Cobb and Charles Elder (1972) developed their agenda-building theory to explain how policy priorities are determined. Both theories have inspired a huge array of empirical studies and conceptual discussions. An important advantage of these theories, besides the denaturalization of social problems, is that they allow ambitious international comparisons, for example the vast enterprise initiated by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones from their model of punctuated equilibrium (Baumgartner, Breunig, & Grossman, 2019). It took almost a decade for the question of the relationship between the media and political agendas to be addressed specifically (Erbring, Goldenberg, & Miller, 1980). Many studies have analyzed government responsiveness to public opinion, where the relationship between the media and policy passes through the general public (Glynn, Herbst, O’Keefe, Shapiro, & Jacobs, 1999). Studies that focus on the direct connection between media agendas and political agendas are far fewer (Cook et al., 1983). A notable exception is Itzhak Yanovitzky’s work (2002) which analyzes media attention to drunk-driving and the policy response to this problem at the level of individual decision-making rather than at the macrosocial level. Beyond the diversity of hypotheses and indicators, most of these studies are fundamentally about classifying operations: they link public policy to the media by ranking social problems according to the attention given to them in various institutions. Thus, the survey methods are based on statistical links between the saliency of issues in media attention, or government priorities. In other words, the indicators measure what can be called symbolic goods: complex social activities such as news-making or policymaking are reduced to their outputs (i.e., TV reports or presidential speeches) which are analyzed as knowledge operations, such as classifying policy priorities or formulating policy alternatives. As Stephan

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Walgrave and Peter Van Aelst (2006) have pointed out, the consequence is that: most political agenda setting studies implicitly claim that media coverage mechanically leads to political attention: Political actors adopt media issues simply because they are covered. But this claim is not anchored in any behavioral theory of political actors. Although largely conducted by political scientists, most political agenda setting studies theoretically neglect the political side of the media–politics relationship. The basic question such a theory should primarily answer is simple: Why do political actors embrace issues put forward by the media? Only drawing upon such an explanatory account can precise hypotheses be developed about which political actors are, and when, most inclined to adopt which issues covered in which media. (pp. 98–99)

The problem-centered viewpoint of agenda setting theory leads to the role of social agents, and that of the social games and social structures shaping these agents, which are all underrated. This agentless abstraction is one of Aeron Davis’ criticisms of scholarly work on parliamentary agenda setting: First is the problem of establishing the line of causality from news media stimuli to political response. Effects research has always struggled to isolate media stimuli and separate them from other possible “real-world” stimuli. Political decision-making is no less of a problem. The passage of legislation, from policy idea to votes in the legislature, is usually a slow-moving process involving multiple actors and information sources. (2007, pp. 182–183)

Agenda setting theory is a powerful tool for describing the hierarchy of issues addressed by an institution. But the social conditions of the circulation of problems from media to policymaking are not sufficiently integrated into the analysis. An action theory (of the various agents of the policymaking process) is needed to explain the effects of the agenda other than by a sociological shortcut according to which the problems or priorities circulate from media agenda to policy agenda on their own. Social Problems’ Implicit Theory of Action In comparison, the paradigm of social problem construction takes the social basis of the symbolic operations of problem setting or problem

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framing more into account. It develops a socio-historical approach of social agents and their practices, social groups, and institutions. In his classic book, Symbolic Crusade (1963), Joseph Gusfield focused his analysis on the issues of social identity for various groups: the symbolic crusade against drinking alcohol set the moral values of Puritan rural America against new forms of urban life associated with recent immigrants from Catholic countries. In The Culture of Public Problems (1981), he showed how institutions such as Science and Law participate in the production of the symbolic order concerning the problem of drunkdriving. Gusfield’s theory of action is radically different from agenda setting theory. The qualitative approach and richness of the empirical investigation, which is written with the conceptual tools of symbolic interactionism (and in particular Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology), give a more sociologically realistic view of this process. But, as Gusfield himself acknowledged, he “restricted [The Culture of Public Problems ] to cultural analysis, keeping social structural analysis subordinate to the main plot” (1981, p. xii): the study of the individuals who produced this symbolic order was to be tackled in another book that was never published. Although his empirical investigations were very promising, he did not give many theoretical elements to explain the concrete work of journalists (which is admittedly not central to his work) nor the political or administrative uses of problems. He was not really interested in the division of labor of social problem construction. Consequently, he hardly opened the black box of institutions to show how they work: who are the individuals who populate them and why do they act the way they do? This structural dimension is central to Stephen Hilgartner and Charles Bosk’s programmatic article (1988) on the public arenas model. The notion of arena offers a theoretical framework to the division of labor, and specifically to the power relations between individuals and institutions involved in the production of the symbolic order. The arena model is more attentive to the specific functioning of social sub-systems (the executive and legislative powers, the courts, the news media, political parties, social movements, etc.). Arenas have general characteristics: “a carrying capacity that limits the number of social problems that it can entertain at any one time” (p. 59) and “the existence of a set of principles of selection that influences which problems will most likely be addressed there” (p. 61). The specific form that these general rules take in each arena must then be revealed through empirical research. Unfortunately, Hilgartner

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and Bosk do not provide conceptual tools to describe what is happening in the arena, i.e., to account for the specificity of the issues, rules of the game, practices, and efficient resources. The arena is a sociological theorization that is more descriptive than explanatory.

Explaining the Effects of Agenda Setting and Social Construction Through Field Theory Field theory is a useful complement to agenda setting and social construction because it explains the classifying operations applied to global problems, such as agenda setting, framing, and priming. Field theory refers to the system developed by Pierre Bourdieu that articulates the concepts of habitus and dispositions, generic (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic) capital and specific (political, administrative, and media) capital, nomos and autonomy, illusio and interest, force field and struggle field. This conceptual system is centered on social agents and the social determinants of their actions (i.e., their interests, their dispositions and their economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital). In a comparative analysis, the relationship between social agents explains their distinctive position-taking. It is the correspondence between the space of positions and the space of position-taking that gives a sociological explanation to the symbolic operations being studied (Bourdieu, 1996; Martin, 2003). This analytical framework accounts for both the production of journalistic information (Baisnée & Nollet, 2019; Benson, 1998; Benson & Neveu, 2005) and public policy (Bourdieu, 1991; Dubois, 2012), as well as the relationships between these two processes. Agenda Setting and Framing as Field Effects Agenda setting may thus be analyzed as a field effect, the result of the action of a set of agents functioning as a structure. When a large number of journalistic outlets take up the same information at the same time, they are setting an issue on the media agenda. This convergence of the hierarchy of information can be explained by the particular forms of competition within the journalistic field, which produce imitation rather than differentiation. Bourdieu described this phenomenon with the concept of “circular circulation” (of editorial choices, sources of information, etc.). This phenomenon can be studied at the level of individual

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journalists or editors: how do editors “spy” on competitors to make editorial choices? It can also be studied at the structural level: when these editorial position-takings are multiplying, we have the impression that the same problem seems to be omnipresent in all media. Similar processes could be shown in the political or administrative fields. Forms of competition and imitation vary from one field to another, but the structural mechanisms are comparable. In the same way, the media “constructs” a social problem when a large number of journalistic outlets describe the same event with the same categories of interpretation. The competitive relationship between agents in the same field can lead them to produce widely different or closely similar points of view on the same problem. This is how the media framing or the political framing of a problem can be explained at the structural level. Agenda and Framing Effects as a Result of the Relationships Between Fields Field theory also explains how the media agenda influences the political agenda or how the media construction of a problem influences political debates or political decisions. For this, it is necessary to analyze the relations between the fields. The fact that a policy agenda fluctuates in the same way as a media agenda does not mean that journalists have the power to determine political (or administrative) agents’ priorities. The circulation of priorities depends on the specific ways in which political or administrative agents use media coverage, according to the specific rules of the political or administrative fields. In other words, these agents use the media to give themselves legitimacy in the political or administrative competition, thanks to the “symbiotic relationship” (Cook et al., 1983) between the journalistic field on the one hand, and the political and administrative fields on the other. This structural relationship between the political field and the media field is often analyzed in terms of the mediatization of politics (Couldry & Hepp, 2013; Livingstone, 2009). As enlightening as this approach is, it is somewhat essentialist. It shows how political activities have been transformed by a “media logic” (Altheide & Snow, 1985) as if this transformation was homogeneous and constant over time. Field theory describes this phenomenon in a less deterministic way. In particular, the concept of media capital (Couldry, 2003; Davis & Seymour, 2010) invites us to think about the use that political agents

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make of media coverage of their own activity. Analyzing this phenomenon as an accumulation of capital (by strategically adapting the political labor to journalistic field rules) can account for variations in the intensity of the mediatization over time and between political agents. The accumulation of media capital transforms the decision-making process, according to agents’ unequal interest and advantages in gaining legitimacy through media coverage and the balance of power between the agents who structure this process. In France, political agents in executive institutions (ministers, etc.) are more invested in accumulating media capital because, in the current configuration of the political game, their legitimacy depends heavily upon it. In the decision-making process, they interact with political and administrative agents who need it less, but their position allows them to make the principles valued in the media field prevail.

Case Study: The Mad Cow Crisis in France Mad cow disease was a transnational health problem in the 1980s and 1990s. The public problem first emerged in Great Britain and then soon after in other countries, including France, Germany, Portugal, Japan, and the United States. It also existed at the supranational level, on the agenda of the European Union and the World Health Organization. Field theory can help to understand the transnational aspect of public problems. The import and export processes of public problems do not occur in an abstract way: they are socially rooted in social fields. While the agenda setting paradigm and, to a lesser extent, the social problems paradigm have some difficulty in contextualizing these processes, field theory can explain the specific logics that generate the agenda setting, the construction, and the international circulation of this problem. In other words, the social problem of mad cow disease did not simply transfer from Britain to France, but from the British journalistic/political/administrative fields to their French counterparts. A heuristic case study of “mad cow” policymaking in France can observe moments of routine, as well as moments of crisis corresponding to phases of agenda setting and of (re)defining the social problem from an agricultural problem to a sanitary one. During these two decades, crisis management was limited to a few weeks, mainly in the spring of 1996 and the fall of 2000. The crises were characterized by very intense media coverage of some aspects of the BSE problem, exacerbated political and

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administrative sensitiveness to this media coverage, and more frequent media-oriented practices from policymakers. Conversely, routine situations were characterized by the disappearance of mad cow disease from the media agenda, the intervention in the decision-making process of agents less invested in the accumulation of media capital, and the creation of public policies according to logics other than the media one. By looking closely at the relationships between journalistic, political, and administrative fields, it is possible to highlight that the social mechanisms for agenda setting and problem construction were very different in 1996 and 2000. A Field Theory of the “Mad Cow” Problem: Methodology This case study aims to describe the practices and resources of journalists, politicians, and senior officials, as well as structural dimensions of their specific logic of action, as comprehensively as possible. In other words, it carries out “in-depth fieldwork in order to analyze the concrete practices through which policy is [elaborated and] enforced in everyday life” (Dubois, 2009) and to explore accurately the political and administrative uses of the access to the media. In this monographic perspective, the evidence does not rely on statistical assessments, but on the objectification of the practical logics of this phenomenon, in order to be able to identify it mutatis mutandis in other cases. The first part of the fieldwork consists in describing the journalistic, political, and administrative practices as thickly as possible, with documentary and archive material from various sources. Parliamentary reports, scientific reports, books written by political or administrative agents, and archives from ministerial institutions are used as a factual source of information about BSE policymaking and uses of the media by political and administrative agents. Notes written by a former communications advisor to the French prime minister, for instance, give a concrete representation of interactions and practices in the prime minister’s personal staff. In-depth sociological interviews with policymakers (mostly high-ranking public servants or members of ministers’ offices involved in the crisis) supplement archival material when it is lacking or inaccessible. This research is also based on the constitution of a media corpus made up of several thousands of national, general-interest press articles and agency press releases, as well as the descriptions of television news

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and programs dedicated to BSE recorded in the French national television archive. The main journalistic categories of perception and judgment about the BSE problem and policymaking are comprehensively analyzed to explain the journalistic construction of the “mad cow” problem. Another important part of the fieldwork is to describe the social trajectories of policymakers, in order to reveal their capitals, their interests, and their dispositions. Contrary to the conception of “actors” in most public policy theories, social agents are not one-dimensional individuals. Their dispositions to act are the result of all their past and present experiences, and are activated in particular fields (and in particular according to their position in the power balance which is specific to each field). The fieldwork therefore includes collecting social properties that could explain the different positions taken in the policymaking process and the different uses made of the media: general properties (age, gender, social origin, education, etc.) and specifically political properties (such as political position: minister, parliamentarian, political advisor, etc.) or specifically administrative ones (such as affiliation to an administration or administrative body). It also reconstructs political careers (i.e., a policy professional’s succession of mandates) and administrative careers (e.g., past positions in an administrative institution, or the former experience of ministerial advisors). A similar approach is needed to explain media coverage. In fact, to understand the social games involved in the production of the media agenda and the journalistic construction of public problems, it is necessary to avoid the generic term “the media” whenever possible and to take the heterogeneity and competition of the media subsystem into account, with the concept “journalistic field.” The analysis of the media corpus is therefore based on the type of media (TV, news agency, daily or weekly press, national or local) and journalistic specialty (political, economic, agricultural, European, etc.). This coding is necessary to account for the social logics of the production of journalistic information, because professional practices (time constraints, relationship to information sources, etc.) and framing vary according to the profiles of journalists, as shown by a sociology of journalism that articulates political economy, organizational analysis, and cultural approach (Marchetti, 2005; Schudson, 2000).

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Agenda Setting and Framing the “Mad Cow” Problem in March 1996 Mad cow disease was identified in British herds in the second half of the 1980s. Because of the scale of this epidemic, a group of MAFF-related experts led by Sir Richard Southwood presented a report on February 27, 1989 which stabilizes the administrative framing of this problem, despite strong scientific uncertainties. The mad cow problem is then framed as an animal problem, thanks in particular to the hypothesis of a “species barrier” (according to which the disease does not transmit to other species). However, in May 1990, a case of transmission of the disease to a cat caused a lot of media coverage in Great Britain. Criticism of government policy by the Labor opposition is reported in the journalistic field, including in the mainstream media. An op-ed in The Economist, dated June 16, 1990, is titled “Mad Ministry Disease”. In Britain, this is the first time on the media and political agendas. This is not reported in the French media. But the veterinary experts monitoring on the British situation sets the mad cow on the French administrative agenda: the Agriculture ministry takes a series of technical measures to prevent the importation of the disease into French territory. The mad cow issue disappeared from British and French media agendas between 1991 and 1995, because of the subject’s low newsworthiness. The problem appears to be under control after taking a series of veterinary health measures. From 1985 to 1996, mad cow disease was low on the French media agenda. Journalists framed BSE as mainly an agricultural problem with veterinary and commercial consequences. It was perceived as a minor problem, deserving merely routine policy attention. In terms of public policies, the problem was managed by the administrative departments of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Economy and Trade, which put in place veterinary solutions against the epizootic and regulations concerning the selling of at-risk meat from the late 1980s. At this stage, these technical measures were little publicized and political agents hardly intervened. For almost a decade the “mad cow” problem was managed by the administrative field and ruled by the technical logic that prevails there. In March 1996, the “mad cow” problem was set on the British political agenda and then very quickly on the French political agenda. To explain this, we will first describe what happened in the British political field, then in the French journalistic field, and finally in the French political field.

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After months of scientific controversy, the crisis erupted on March 20, 1996, when the British Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell, announced in the House of Commons that ten people had a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD), eight of whom had already died. It was interpreted as the near-confirmation of the transmission of BSE to humans. This immediately generated a multitude of political reactions. It was widely reported in the British and European media. The relationship between politics and the media explains the intense coverage. Journalists are structurally dependent on official sources of information, including ministries, so that the Health Secretary’s announcement could only be widely repeated in the media. The “mad cow” problem, which was already on the British political and media agendas, now took a prominent place (Lay, 2008; Washer, 2006). Until March 1996, the French general media had a limited interest in mad cow disease. Information was regularly given in specialized sections, but rarely made headlines. For example, newspapers regularly reported the announcement of a new case of mad cow in French livestock. The media frames were based on official sources of information, especially the Ministry of Agriculture. The mad cow problem was constructed as a veterinary problem, that is to say an animal health problem that calls for veterinary measures. Media agenda setting for mad cow disease really began in March 1996, after the British Health Secretary’s official statement, which generated immediate and abundant position-taking by French politicians, as well as unprecedented media coverage. The mad cow disease became framed as a public health crisis, rather than an agricultural problem. The journalistic field focused on the consequences of BSE on consumer health and criticized the executive, especially the Ministry of Agriculture. Public policies were criticized according to three criteria: responsiveness (does the policy address the public problem as it is framed by the journalistic field?), independence (is the policy free from the influence of lobbies?), and transparency (are policymakers not concealing information about their activities?). The agenda setting and the construction of the social problem in the journalistic field was the result of its structural functioning, which generated enormous attention on just a few questions (Champagne & Marchetti, 2005). The dominant position of TV in the 1990s meant that other journalistic subfields also favored speed, brevity, and spectacular visuals (Marchetti, 2005). The dominant journalistic norms consisted

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in producing information that maximized audience ratings and lowered labor costs (Champagne, 2005). But this general rule (which Bourdieu called nomos ) did not have the same weight throughout the journalistic field: it influenced the more commercial pole of this field—TV reporters and political journalists for major newspapers—more than specialized journalists. From 1985 to 1996, journalists specializing in agricultural or European issues had had a near monopoly on mad cow disease, generating less attention and framing the issue in a more technical and unproblematic way. The commercial nomos was strengthened in 1996 and in 2000 when news-making about the mad cow problem became dominated by generalist journalists (Marchetti, 2005). These journalists tended to produce a more dramatic construction of the mad cow problem, placing more emphasis on the public health crisis dimension than specialized journalists had done. And since they occupied a dominant position in the journalistic field, they gave the mad cow problem a preeminent place in the news. This was reinforced by other structural mechanisms, such as the “circular circulation” of information (i.e., the fact that competition between media outlets is reflected in the imitation of information) or by the logic of the precedent (i.e., the existence of similar precedents gives this fact greater newsworthiness).2 In other words, field theory—in particular the struggle between categories of journalists for professional recognition, or the accumulation of journalistic capital—explains the carrying capacity and the principles of selection in the media arena, and, consequently, the problem’s saliency and framing. The day after the British minister’s statement, the French government placed an embargo on meat and live cattle from Great Britain. On March 25, 1996, the French Minister of Agriculture went on the main French TV news program to announce a symbolic measure to reassure consumers: the creation of a label for French meat. Other measures were implemented throughout the spring and summer of 1996. Some were quite spectacular. On April 16, 1996, the Minister of Agriculture announced to the National Assembly that 76,000 British calves sent to France since March 22 would be slaughtered. Government responsiveness to the media agenda and construction of the problem was the result of the structural links between the political and journalistic fields. Since the 1980s, the French political field has tended to be governed by a social rule that consists of increasing political legitimacy by accumulating media capital (Davis & Seymour, 2010). Indeed,

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a complex and powerful network linking political agents and journalists, as well as various experts in political communication (such as spin doctors, political consultants, and pollsters) shapes a particular social game within the political field. In this media-oriented political game, political practices are based on media-access strategies (Schlesinger, 1990). Political position-taking, especially from those who are involved in policymaking, conforms to journalistic rules. For instance, political decisions are taken faster in order to fit the journalistic schedule and avoid being perceived as too slow. A good media image and favorable polls depend on heteronomous approval of politicians’ mediatized positions. In other words, the rule (the nomos ) of the political field is modified by the systematic use of media coverage. But contrary to the assumption of the mediatization paradigm, the accumulation of media capital is not a homogeneous phenomenon in the political field, nor are the structural effects of the journalistic field on political agents constant. The accumulation of media capital depends on politicians’ interests (illusio) and dispositions (habitus ), and therefore on their position and career. Agents who occupy dominant political positions (i.e., senior ministers) are the most likely to access the media. In French politics, executive positions are the most involved in accumulating media capital and this interest structures the practices of the president, ministers, and their staff. Political communication is strongly media-driven.3 MPs and senators are interested in accumulating media capital, but their behavior is more bound by specifically political rules, such as party discipline. The media coverage of political agents involved in the mad cow crisis shows that the effects of position are tempered by trajectory effects. For instance, political agents who rapidly reach dominant positions (i.e., those who become MPs, party leaders or ministers sooner than most politicians) or those who have just left dominant positions (i.e., former ministers) are more likely to accumulate media capital. Indeed, their careers generate resources, constraints, interests, and dispositions that make exogenous journalistic legitimization more necessary. Political agents who have a high media profile tend to integrate the rules of media capital accumulation into their daily work. Political speeches and decisions are far more structured by the media agenda and frames than by administrative-technical expertise. In other words, the process of developing policy by ministers and their staff is relatively frequently based on the media agenda and problem construction. Compared with executive political practice, parliamentary involvement in

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policymaking (i.e., the legislative process, and some investigations and questions) are less media-driven. The most explicitly media-driven decisions during the mad cow crisis were made by the political agents who were most dependent on media capital accumulation (i.e., the prime minister, ministers and the most generalist members in their staff). The analytical tools of field theory—that is to say, the specific forms taken by the balance of political power and the struggle for the accumulation of media capital—explain that agenda setting and problem construction of mad cow by the media have political effects. A Different Framing Dynamic in November 2000 In November 2000, the mad cow problem unexpectedly returned to the French political agenda. But this time the media agenda setting and problem construction processes were very different. While in 1996 the journalistic field only relayed and amplified political positions, in 2000 it “created” the problem itself. In November 2000, several facts about mad cow appeared in the media in the same week. First, the French media reported the publication of a British parliamentary report that was highly critical of the management of the 1996 crisis. Then the daily newspaper Libération published confidential administrative documents that revealed there was some leeway in veterinary checks on the presence of animal meal in cattle feed. Libération’s scoop was widely reported in all the mainstream media outlets. This is typical of what Bourdieu called “circular circulation”: when one outlet reveals newsworthy information, most other media repeat it, and thus give the problem a symbolic consecration. In a few days, the mad cow problem hit the headlines of most of the general French news media, which were very critical of the government. As the mad cow problem became newsworthy, reporters sought new information about it. For several weeks, new facts were regularly revealed and kept the subject at the top of the media agenda. The media coverage of mad cow in November 2000 provoked strong reactions in the political field. Many political agents intervened publicly: from the president of the Republic and the prime minister, to the mayors of large cities, through parliamentarians and members of the government. In addition to the structural tendency for dominant political agents to want to accumulate media capital, the tense political context at the time—with the executive power split between a right-wing president and

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a left-wing prime minister, and the presidential election only a year and a half away—explains all this position-taking. The tension was strong between the two camps. Public policies decided by the left-wing government were strongly criticized by right-wing parliamentarians. In this logic, media coverage of the mad cow crisis was a resource for the competition between the two major political parties: right-wing politicians criticized the government’s lack of political, while left-wing politicians criticized the demagogy of the president and his MPs. These confrontations took place largely through media-oriented position-taking. On both sides, the goal was to accumulate media capital to prepare for the upcoming presidential election. The initially purely journalistic agenda setting of the mad cow problem became a particularly powerful resource in the heightened political competition.

Conclusion: A Non-deterministic Theory of Media Influence on Policymaking Field theory is a heuristic theory of action for agenda setting and social problems studies. The relational analysis of the journalistic field explains why, in certain circumstances, certain issues attract the attention of a large number of media outlets. The importance of accumulating media capital for political domination explains why executive political agents tend to make media-oriented decisions. Field theory, as a relational sociological model, is a useful framework for explaining how agenda setting and problem building achieve their effects. Field theory is also useful for giving a non-deterministic explanation to these effects. Political agents and administrative agents even more so cannot behave in a purely media-oriented logic. They are always involved in a configuration of heterogeneous rules and expectations. Media capital accumulation is one of these, but it is far from being the only principle behind policy positions. Most of the time, the autonomous rules of the political and administrative fields predominate and the effects of agenda setting and media construction on public policy are weak or even nonexistent. But, in certain circumstances, political or administrative agents may make policy decisions according to the rules of the journalistic field. In other words, media agenda setting effects occur when political agents behave according to the rules of the media-oriented game. Policymaking is a complex process that involves various agents and institutions and thus may be influenced by autonomous rules or, on the

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contrary, by the heteronomous rule of media capital accumulation. It is also a competitive and unstable process: the dominant agents (i.e., those who make the final decision) change according to the political or administrative struggles, the issues at stake, and the circumstances. In some cases, the dominant policymakers are ministers and advisers who are largely involved in media capital accumulation. In other cases, the policymaking process is dominated by social agents who are relatively autonomous from the media-oriented game, such as MPs or high-ranking public servants. Stefaan Walgrave and Peter Van Aelst (2006) have highlighted that agenda setting studies that analyze media effects on public policies lead to contradictory results. This would seem to indicate that the media’s political agenda setting power is a contingent phenomenon. A nondeterministic theory of action, such as field theory, offers a sociological framework for these contingent effects. The theoretical framework of field theory also explains the international circulation of social problems, since it sheds light on how the power relations between fields in a country block, reframe, refract the perception, construction, and management of “global” problems. Differences in the structuring of fields and their relationships of interdependence between Great Britain and France thus lead to different modes of crisis definition and management.4 Thus, the rules of the journalistic fields in Great Britain and France partly explain the framing in terms of earlier health scandal in Great Britain. A stronger politicization of the newspapers generates more critical positions against the government. The presence of tabloids makes denunciation of scandals stronger. In France, on the contrary, specialized journalists are highly dependent on ministerial sources. The explanation also lies in a fairly different structuring of administrative fields: in Great Britain, unlike France, food policies have long been managed by both the administration of Agriculture and that of Health, which makes it easier for journalists to find critical voices compared to the framing initially imposed by veterinary experts. Conversely, the fact that the British political field does not create a situation of cohabitation between two executive leaders belonging to opposing political camps partly explains that there is no new agenda setting of this problem in Britain. In other words, an analysis of global problems through the prism of field theory can benefit from an analogy with Bourdieu’s analysis of “The social conditions of the international circulation of ideas”: “Texts circulate

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without their context; they don’t carry with them the field of production they come from, and the receivers, themselves integrated in a different field of production, reinterpret them in accordance with their position in the field of reception. A science of international relations in matters of culture should in each case take as its object the whole series of social operations involved and, in particular, the processes of selection and marking.” Just replace the word “text” by “public problem”, to imagine a research program on the globalization of public problems.

Notes 1. The crisis returned to France in the fall of 2000, though not to other European countries. 2. The British minister’s dramatic announcement on the transmission of mad cow disease to humans echoed other public health crises that had shaken France in previous years. 3. This media-oriented communication has been well described for American presidents (Cook, 1998; Kernell, 1986; Paletz & Entman, 1980). 4. This assertion concurs with the analysis of Rodney Benson and Abigail C. Saguy (2005), who demonstrate that the differences in the media framing of immigration and sexual harassment issues between France and the United States are largely explained by differences in rules for journalistic fields in these two countries (in particular differences in relations to the market or to the State).

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Bourdieu, P. (1991). Political representation: Elements for a theory of the political field. In P. Bourdieu (Ed.), Language and symbolic power (pp. 171–202). London: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The rules of art. London: Polity Press. Champagne, P. (2005). The “double dependency”: The journalistic field between politics and markets. In R. Benson & E. Neveu (Eds.), Bourdieu and the journalistic field (pp. 48–63). London: Polity Press. Champagne, P., & Marchetti, D. (2005). The contaminated blood scandal: Reframing medical news. In R. Benson & E. Neveu (Eds.), Bourdieu and the journalistic field (pp. 113–134). London: Polity Press. Cobb, R. W., & Elder, C. D. (1972). Participation in American politics: The dynamics of agenda-building. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Cook, T. E. (1998). Governing with the news. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cook, F. L., Tyler, T. R., Goetz, E. G., Gordon, M. T., Protess, D., Leff, D. R., & Molotch, H. L. (1983). Media and agenda setting: Effects on the public, interest group leaders, policy makers, and policy. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 47 (1), 16–35. Couldry, N. (2003). Media meta-capital: Extending the range of Bourdieu’s field theory. Theory and Society, 32(5–6), 653–677. Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2013). Conceptualizing mediatization. Communication Theory, 23, 191–202. Davis, A. (2007). Investigating journalist influences on political issue agendas at Westminster. Political Communication, 24(2), 181–199. Davis, A., & Seymour, E. (2010). Generating forms of media capital inside and outside a field: The strange case of David Cameron in the UK political field. Media, Culture and Society, 32(5), 739–759. Dubois, V. (2009). Towards a critical policy ethnography. The “undeserving poor” and the new welfare state. Critical Policy Studies, 3(2), 219–237. Dubois, V. (2012). The fields of public policy. In M. Hilgers & E. Mangez (Eds.), Social field theory: Concept and applications (pp. 29–51). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erbring, L., Goldenberg, E. N., & Miller, R. H. (1980). Front-page news and real-world cues: A new look at agenda-setting by the media. American Journal of Political Science, 24(1), 16–49. Glynn, C., Herbst, S., O’Keefe, G., Shapiro, R., & Jacobs, L. (1999). Public opinion and policymaking. In C. J. Glynn, S. Herbst, G. J. O’Keefe, & R. Y. Shapiro (Eds.), Public opinion (pp. 299–340). Westview Press. Gusfield, J. (1963). Symbolic crusade: Status politics and the American temperance movement and the culture of public problems. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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PART II

Mapping the Actors and the Social Logics of Issues’ Globalization

CHAPTER 6

“Accidents Without Borders”? The Renationalization of a Global Problem in the French Media Valerie Arnhold

Nuclear accidents are often presented as inherently “global” issues. The phrase “an accident anywhere is an accident everywhere” has become commonplace in the French and international nuclear sectors. The famous radioactive “clouds” symbolize the ability of radionuclides to “travel” across borders and they have often spread disastrous environmental and health consequences across the globe. Transnational anti-nuclear movements, whether opposed to the military or civil use of nuclear power, have led to multiple cross-border protests, especially against the development of civil nuclear programs in Europe during the 1970s. Frequent political conflict over nuclear energy on an international level brought about the creation of several international organizations to cooperate in the field of safeguards (Hecht, 2006; Roehrlich, 2016), radiation protection (Boudia, 2007), or more recently nuclear safety (Arnhold, 2019).

V. Arnhold (B) Center for the Sociology of Organizations; Center for International Studies, Sciences Po, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_6

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Yet the extent to which the international dimensions of nuclear energy become visible in the public sphere remains understudied. There are considerable political and economic stakes in addressing the international implications of nuclear energy. Hecht has shown how uranium mines in Africa were at first excluded from international recognition of “nuclearity” with direct effects on the protection of mineworkers compared to that of workers in nuclear power plants (Hecht, 2012). In Europe, recent historical studies have shown how borders became catalysts for political protests against nuclear installations (Kaijser & Meyer, 2018; Le Renard, 2018). The transnational aspect of nuclear accidents is highly relevant to the nuclear industry and governments, especially in a political context in which certain countries have been advocating for a reduced share of nuclear energy since Chernobyl. Nuclear accidents therefore provide a rich basis for studying the political stakes attached to the formation or deformation of “global problems.” To what extent are the global consequences of nuclear accidents the focus of media attention? In order to study this question over time, this chapter compares the coverage, in France, of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and of the Fukushima accident in 2011. Due to its large nuclear program—with 58 reactors in operation and the highest relative share of nuclear-generated electricity in the world—France is the focal point of several transnational movements and intergovernmental conflicts over the potential consequences of nuclear energy. The existence of a strong single operator is another specificity of the French context: the partially state-owned company EDF has a near-monopoly on the production of electricity and coproduces regulations with state officials. The Chernobyl accident was a turning point for French nuclear institutions. Public and industry officials were widely challenged for their reassuring public statements and denials of any health consequences in France, encapsulated in the famous phrase about the radioactive “cloud that stopped at the border,” denounced by social movements as a “state lie” (Topçu, 2013). The Chernobyl crisis led to profound organizational reforms. International conventions on information-sharing and coordination in the case of a nuclear accident were set up in 1986. Numerous working groups under the leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regularly bring together national representatives from ministries and agencies to produce international norms of nuclear safety. In France, the expert organization Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN) was created in 2002 and the government safety agency

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Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN) in 2006.1 Both agencies aim to improve public oversight of nuclear activities and the communication toward several external “publics” (Carpenter, 2010). They have collaborated with neighboring countries as part of bilateral commissions, as well as with transnational networks of national experts and nuclear safety regulators. How have these organizational changes affected media coverage of nuclear accidents, and Fukushima in particular? The differences in the “underlying events,” such as geographical proximity and radioactive contaminations, should not be overestimated, as they have been shown to be often misleading indicators for the media and political relevance of events.2 This chapter focuses on the relationship between international and European institutions, transnational claims-making, and social problems by combining the analysis of two specific French media channels—the newspaper Le Monde and the TV channel France 2—with the results from an ethnographic study on claims-making. The chapter shows how the visibility of the international stakes of nuclear accidents has diminished in the French media over time. While international claims-makers, international victims, borders, and crossborder conflicts were all central to the French coverage of Chernobyl, Fukushima has been treated predominantly as a problem for Japan and France. These findings, described as a renationalization of the problem of nuclear accidents, invite us to broaden the analytical lens through which “global problems” can be investigated. Similarly to the process that Gusfield described as the reduction of “contested meanings” in the construction of a social problem (Gusfield, 1996), the construction of a global problem has led to the disappearance of the alternative interpretations and definitional struggles that contributed to politicizing the coverage of Chernobyl. This disappearance can be related to our qualitative findings on transnational organizations contributing to a shared definition of nuclear accidents. Agencies play an important role in the translation of international stakes and information for the French context.

Methodology and Analytical Framework The comparative analysis of the coverage of Chernobyl and Fukushima is based on all news articles (1700) in the French newspaper Le Monde and TV segments (277) on the France 2 evening news that mention Chernobyl in the two years following that accident (from April 26, 1986, to

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the end of May 1988) and Fukushima in the two years following that accident (from March 11, 2011, to the end of April 2013). Le Monde is the third most sold newspaper in France3 and works as a reference for other French media formats regarding nuclear issues (Blanchard, 2010; Brouard & Guinaudeau, 2017). The Inathèque database4 contains both headlines and descriptions of all news stories on France 2 for both periods. The qualitative data stems from an ethnographic study of French and international nuclear safety, regulation, and government of nuclear accidents. The study included over 90 interviews, conducted between 2014 and 2017, with civil servants, safety experts, government officials, and industry representatives from France and other European countries on the management of the Fukushima crisis, as well as on the transformations of the government of nuclear accidents since Chernobyl. This chapter draws on different qualitative and quantitative indicators to capture diverse understandings of the “global” in the media coverage of Chernobyl and Fukushima in France, with “transnational” relating to the number of countries mentioned as being affected in one way or another by the accidents, “international” mainly referring to institutions embodying the idea of the global rather than geographical locations, and “cross-border” often referring to effects and conflicts in neighboring countries or border regions, characterized by mutual influence on the level of institutions and citizens crossing the border. Finally, the chapter looks at the appearance of “Europe” (focusing exclusively on the European Communities/European Union) as a new geographical and institutional area of cooperation and coordination aimed at addressing the global effects of nuclear energy. Our findings rely on detailed content analysis of TV segments and newspaper articles, as well as on inductive coding of the countries and wider geographic areas mentioned in both data sources. Coding initially reflected every geographic category mentioned in the original sources, for example, the multiple ways of referring to “Europe,” the “European Communities,” the “European Union,” or regions, such as “Scandinavia,” before summarizing them in Table 6.1. “International” similarly refers to mentions of international consequences and effects without specifying countries, or of “international” institutions, such as the IAEA. Our detailed content analysis makes it possible to connect occurrences to the meanings attached to the polysemous notions, depending on the period and specific news story. In sum, this chapter will show how various

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Table 6.1 Geographical areas mentioned in newspaper articles and TV segments about Chernobyl and Fukushima

Note The average number of countries or geographical areas mentioned per newspaper article is 1.3 in the case of Chernobyl and 1.13 in the case of Fukushima. The average number of countries or geographical areas mentioned per TV segment is 1.19 in the case of Chernobyl and 1.08 in the case of Fukushima

indigenous notions are used to frame the global events of Chernobyl and Fukushima, with considerable variance over time.

Comparing the French Media Coverage of Chernobyl and Fukushima: From a Global to a National Issue? Table 6.1 gives an overview of the various geographic and institutional areas that appear in the newspaper articles and TV segments. The coverage of Chernobyl in both media formats refers to a greater variety of places. Nearly all individual countries and country groups are mentioned more often in relation to Chernobyl than to Fukushima across both media formats. The Fukushima coverage refers predominantly to France and the accident country (71.9% in Le Monde and 93.9% on France 2), while this is only the case for a little over half the Chernobyl coverage (54.7% in Le

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Monde and 68.6% on France 2). In addition, references to the European Communities, the European Union, as well as “Europe” and “International” more generally, are more frequent in the case of Chernobyl than in the case of Fukushima. While the tendencies described above apply to both Le Monde and France 2, they are more marked in the case of France 2. Overall, there are more newspaper articles than TV segments devoted to either accident, both in absolute terms and in relative coverage compared to the overall carrying capacity.5 The general tendencies may therefore appear stronger, as journalists operate a higher selection of news stories on television, but the criteria of this selection do not seem to vary considerably compared to the newspaper. From International Politics and East–West Relations to French and Japanese Safety and Economic Concerns In order to understand these quantitative patterns, it is important to analyze the ways in which the “international” dimensions of both accidents are interpreted. In the case of Chernobyl, international references were present from the start, beginning with the sources of information on the accident. Throughout May 1986, articles and TV segments related the scarce information available about the numbers of victims and evacuees, commented by French experts, but also by international organizations such as the IAEA and the OECD. In early May, the exact date of the accident (April 26) could still not be determined and no photo of the local situation was available. Mikhail Gorbachev’s first declarations were not deemed credible and a number of European governments’ demands for more official information were quoted. From mid-May, the French government began to be criticized for treating information too passively compared to other European governments. The dominant interpretation of Chernobyl, especially in Le Monde, was linked to international politics, be it “international,” “transnational,” or “cross-border.” Regarding “international” references, the limited sharing of information was discussed at the G7 summit a few days after the accident and it was agreed that an international convention on sharing information in the case of a nuclear accident would be prepared under the leadership of the IAEA. Several articles and segments presented the agency and its role in nuclear accidents.6 The “Vienna conference” in August brought together Eastern and Western scientists and government

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officials to present and discuss the accident, leading to several articles about the explanations of Chernobyl.7 About a month later, the adoption of two international conventions on “early notification” and “mutual assistance” in the case of nuclear accidents were covered.8 They were presented in Le Monde as an attempt to “foster confidence” in nuclear energy and to pursue its development on the international level. Quoting a U.K. official, one article stated that these initiatives for “learning the lessons” used Chernobyl as a “laboratory” for gaining international experience with nuclear accidents. Several other international organizations and events are important in the Chernobyl coverage. The accident is mentioned in relation to the 31st General Assembly of the UN, the G7 summit, the OECD, the World Conference on radiation health treatment, the World Conference on energy, the International Energy Agency, the International Air Transport Association, international cooperation in the nuclear and chemical industries, and an international Greenpeace report. As well as organizations, “international” also refers to more general, rather undefined locations, such as in “international” catastrophes9 and the “worldwide” effects of the accident, including the social movements and protests against nuclear energy.10 “Transnational” issues were also at the heart of the Chernobyl coverage. Most prominently, this concerned East–West relations during the Cold War. In his first speech about Chernobyl on May 14, Mikhaïl Gorbachev underlined that the number of victims was far smaller than the potential number of victims of nuclear war, a comparison condemned by the author of the article. The debate about nuclear energy in Europe was also a transnational issue, with obvious implications for the French nuclear industry. Chernobyl was perceived as endangering the future of nuclear energy at a time when the United States and the United Kingdom were deciding whether to build new nuclear power plants. In the case of Fukushima, “international” and “transnational” issues did not dominate the narrative. The immediate coverage of the accident on March 11, 2011, focused predominantly on Japan. The coverage was extensive. Television broadcasted aerial footage of the power plant, including the explosions in the following days. The humanitarian situation also featured heavily: the numbers of victims and evacuees were regularly updated in the press, and correspondents in Tokyo interviewed victims in Japan and French nationals attempting to leave the country. International

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actors such as the IAEA and the WHO were sometimes quoted, initially mainly to underline their rather secondary role.11 The organizations most often cited in the Fukushima accident in Le Monde and on France 2 were the French nuclear safety agency ASN and the expert organization IRSN. They provided precise technical information on the power plant (in particular the safety measures, such as containment, possible cooling methods depending on the type of reactor, and the plant’s level of protection against earthquakes) and minute-byminute commentary on the evolution of the accident. While much of the media coverage focused on Japan, several articles and segments aimed at understanding how nuclear safety was managed in France, quoting both the EDF and the ASN. In addition, the French government announced a test of all French nuclear power plants. The ASN was quoted explaining how nuclear oversight, control, and inspections were organized in France, and deeming that lessons would be learned from the Japanese accident.12 Other narratives about Fukushima, such as the ones related to the political future of nuclear energy, also remained centered on France. The accident was mentioned in the context of the French primary and presidential election campaigns at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. Compared to the European-wide debate on the future of nuclear energy after Chernobyl, the debate after Fukushima was limited to French representatives taking divergent positions on the future of nuclear energy.13 The “international” dimension of the Fukushima accident applied predominantly to its economic consequences, largely covered in the economy section of Le Monde.14 The newspaper analyzed its effects on international energy markets,15 on industrialization and growth patterns around the world, as well as on French construction and operating companies and their international investment strategies and market positions.16 Fukushima was seen as having a negative impact on an already tense economic situation for nuclear energy in competition with other forms of electricity production. From European and Cross-Border Conflict After Chernobyl to a Common Response to Fukushima News stories on Chernobyl referred to Europe in a variety of ways. The European Communities and related political and institutional processes were covered, for example regarding action taken on imports of food and

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agricultural products. Disagreements on radiation protection measures and new foodstuffs regulations were highlighted.17 Indeed, during the crisis, member states had introduced quite different temporary measures. Social movements challenged these contradictions, pointing out that some governments were not adequately protecting the population. The foodstuffs regulation, finally adopted on December 14, 1987, preempted any future contradictions by fixing common European norms on radiation protection dose levels. Other Chernobyl-related conflicts between European countries required action on the part of the European Parliament, the European Council, European political formations, such as the Greens or the European left, as well as ministers’ meetings. These conflicts concerned general policy objectives and action, such as energy policy in the EC,18 as well as, more specific to the nuclear accident, the measurement and interpretation of radiation contamination data and health effects,19 the attribution of responsibilities, and remedial action.20 The Chernobyl coverage also referred to other understandings of “Europe” not specifically related to the European Communities, such as the trajectory of the radioactive cloud,21 the reactions of the surrounding populations to it,22 the often troubling divergences between official responses in France and those in other countries,23 as well as anti-nuclear demonstrations in various European countries, including France.24 The Fukushima coverage contained fewer references to “Europe.” Any “European” content was also less diverse. France 2 focused on divergent nuclear energy policies in European countries and on the EU level,25 while Le Monde referred almost exclusively to the so-called European “stress-test” exercise,26 announced a few days after Fukushima (inspired by the banking stress-tests after the financial crisis), with the aim of “testing” (theoretically) the resistance of nuclear power plants in Europe against a Fukushima-type accident. While the European Commission attempted to pilot the exercise, it was conducted by national nuclear safety authorities, mandated by the European Council, based on nonmandatory criteria and safety standards. The number of European institutions mentioned in the Fukushima coverage was strikingly lower than in the Chernobyl coverage, restricted predominantly to the European Energy Commissioner Günther Öttinger and the national safety agencies.27 The understanding of “Europe” now referred only marginally to EU institutions, and more to technical forms of cooperation and networks of national actors, in direct relation with the European Commission.28

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National safety agencies took the role of intermediaries between the European Union and nation states, becoming both the main actors in news stories and the key claims-makers framing media discourses on the “lessons” to be learned from Fukushima. They translated the stakes of the European stress-tests for the French context, which reflected at the same time the organizational stakes of governmental agencies in the context of the crisis. The general focus of the newspaper was therefore on France, while comparisons with other countries were rare, so that the range of conflicts presented was narrow and reflected the perspective of the agencies. In an attempt to make the stress-test results more comparable, for example, the European Commission published its own report following “a different methodology” and included “a table which propose[d] a sort of comparison of 147 European reactors, but which compare[d] apples and oranges,” in which the French situation appeared as substandard. This report was criticized for a lack of technical knowledge about nuclear safety and as an expression of illegitimate supranational intervention.29 The Disappearance of Cross-Border Conflict and the Role of Germany in France Finally, the appearance and framing of “cross-border” issues also differed greatly in the Chernobyl and Fukushima coverage. In the case of Chernobyl, the movement of the cloud, in addition to the transnational perspective highlighted above, was also addressed from the perspective of borders. For example, an article in Le Monde, entitled “The Chernobyl effect” (May 19, 1986), points out that “for clouds, Europe does not have borders,” before recalling and comparing the political consequences in various European countries. In addition, neighboring countries criticized the lack of radiation protection measures in France and protested against French power plants, such as Cattenom. The Cattenom power plant had already been subject to conflicts before Chernobyl (Tauer, 2012). In its aftermath, German local and regional politicians close to the French border filed a complaint against this new nuclear power plant at the administrative court in Strasburg. The conflict was temporarily resolved by an agreement to exchange information about the operation and control of future nuclear activities in Cattenom. Some newspaper articles also reported unsuccessful attempts by EDF officials to “reassure” Luxemburgish and German politicians. At the first meeting between the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Jacques Chirac,

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in September 1986, new bilateral and European modes of cooperation on nuclear safety were discussed.30 In the newspaper and TV coverage of Fukushima, on the other hand, cross-border issues and cooperation barely featured, even though anti-nuclear demonstrations and conflicts in border regions still occurred. The French news stories covering the situation in Germany illustrate the difference well. German radiation protection measures after Chernobyl and the German decision to completely phase out nuclear energy after Fukushima led to political conflict between government officials and nuclear specialists. The French media’s critical stance on the German position in both cases may be explained by a tendency to reproduce dominant government positions (Best, 2010; Gamson & Modigliani, 1989). After Chernobyl, radiation protection measures in Germany were considered to reflect an “irrational” German “Angst.”31 Borders were particularly visible on France 2, where several interviews were conducted in the French-German border region.32 Anti-nuclear demonstrations in Germany, especially the “violent protest” against a planned reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf, constituted another frequent topic.33 The articles and segments also discussed the role of the “radicalized” German Green Party in these protests.34 Political conflict related to Chernobyl appeared in intra-party debates, regional elections, and the national debate on the future orientation of nuclear policy. The coverage of Germany also included the creation of the Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Reactor Safety, new nuclear power plants, a cover-up, and corruption scandal at a nuclear facility, and increased investment in renewable energies.35 After Fukushima, the French and German governments, ministries, nuclear experts, and industry clashed over the decision to phase out nuclear, as well as nuclear safety reform in Europe, subsidies on the European level, and crisis management norms and measures, but the coverage of these conflicts in France 2 and Le Monde was scarce. Germany was not mentioned in the TV coverage of Fukushima36 and appeared proportionally less frequently in the newspaper coverage of Fukushima than in that of Chernobyl. Articles about Germany in Le Monde presented the phase-out decision mainly from the perspective of political elites and the central executive, with a particular emphasis on the role of Angela Merkel.37 They also related the conflicts within the German government in preparing the phase-out decision.38 About half the articles mentioning Germany assessed the economic consequences of the phaseout for the

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German industry and the implications for France.39 Other negative consequences of the phaseout that were highlighted included the “return of coal” and “network outages.”40 Given that the coverage on Germany after Fukushima was restricted to political and industry elites, other actors, such as anti-nuclear movements, were mostly absent. Articles did not relate Franco-German conflict over energy policies, but, unlike the Chernobyl coverage, focused on covering events in Germany and their effects on the industry. The international consequences of Fukushima that are highlighted are restricted to economic consequences, rather than environmental, human, or political consequences.

Discussion: The Role of International Cooperation on Claims-Making and the Media Treatment of Nuclear Accidents in France The different patterns in the coverage of the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents may be better understood by looking at the parallel process of problem construction and institution building in the intervening period. Indeed, the main difference in their coverage can be described as a shrinkage in the number of narratives, actors, and international consequences. While Chernobyl is subject to conflict and “contested meanings” (Gusfield, 1981, 1996), giving voice to both institutional and non-institutional actors and reflecting diverse problem definitions, the Fukushima coverage centers on (mainly national) elite actors, and a shared definition of nuclear accidents as a matter for nuclear safety (and to a lesser extent, for the economy), with shared definitions also of the international and European dimensions of the problem. Interestingly, this makes the international and cross-border dimensions of the problem less visible over time. While one can practically “see” the problem traveling across borders after Chernobyl, for instance by following cross-border citizens or organizations, when the Fukushima coverage refers to international or European actors and consequences of the accident it is mainly from a French perspective. How did this shared problem definition come about? A particularly striking finding of this study is the similarity between news stories on Fukushima and the discourses produced by nuclear safety government agencies and experts. The dominance of nuclear safety in the French debate on nuclear accidents is a result of national and international transformations, through which government agencies became

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the dominant claims-makers during the Fukushima accident. Properly understanding their role would require studying their relationships with challenging and media actors. Their position is the result of continuous work on building relationships of trust with various publics that rely on them as official sources of nuclear-related information. In the crisis related to Fukushima, French government agencies coordinated their official responses to the accident to fit with earlier promises on nuclear safety. They also used the accident as an opportunity to negotiate increased investment in nuclear safety, by communicating widely about the “lessons to be learned” from Fukushima. International, bilateral, and European cooperation agencies are useful sources of information on both the accident in Japan and potential new safety measures. At the same time, these agencies channel political and cross-border conflict toward the outwardly less controversial issue of nuclear safety regulations. This displacement of political conflict is the result of lengthy international and European negotiations. The nuclear safety directive that the European Commission began working on in the late 1990s initially encountered strong resistance from both pro- and anti-nuclear member states, with the former fearing excessive regulation constraints and the latter fearing an institutionalization of a pro-nuclear policy in the European Union (Axelrod, 2006). In response to these attempts to impose legally binding norms, national government safety agencies developed an alternative form of cooperation, with an informal status outside the EU institutions, based on the adoption of “technical” and non-binding standards of nuclear safety. Both pro- and anti-nuclear member states sent representatives to these meetings, which gradually established nuclear safety regulation as a common ground between different political positions, based on the idea that “as long as nuclear energy remains part of Europe, we need to work together continuously to reduce its risks.”41 The expression of political conflict was proscribed, and, unlike in the Chernobyl period, nuclear energy policy choices were considered mainly a matter of national sovereignty, rather than a subject for collective political debate on the diplomatic or European level. This distinction was maintained after the adoption of a nuclear safety directive in 2009 and revised after Fukushima, with the established forms of cooperation being institutionalized as associations of national regulators and experts. These working groups, together with bilateral and international forms of cooperation—in which the same national nuclear regulators and experts

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move—result in lasting relationships, common categories, and partially shared norms over public discourses on nuclear accidents. International and European agencies affected the French crisis management directly and indirectly. Official channels such as the IAEA were criticized by government agencies for not providing timely or useful information, in contrast to the direct contacts established between the relevant agencies of different countries during the crisis. However, the IAEA organized a common international assessment of the causes of the Fukushima accident, based on working groups made up of national nuclear experts, public officials, and industry representatives. In Europe, the stress-test procedure coordinated the responses of various governments. The existence of European safety associations, in which governments and experts continuously participated, prevented open criticism of safety and crisis management in other countries, as well as of foreign political decisions, since cooperation relied on the principle of (discursively) separating politics and safety. This was particularly apparent in the German phase-out decision, which led to considerable disputes within organizations and between governments and agencies, but that were not really expressed in public. The interpretation of the disaster as a safety issue alone can be described as an appropriation of the accident by safety regulators and experts (Arnhold, 2019). Safety agencies translated international and European post-accident procedures for the French public, repeating the basic common principles of nuclear safety, but also framing the accident within their own political and organizational mandates. This left little space for international comparison or to evaluate the political or regulatory situations elsewhere, other than in Japan. On the contrary, the safety agencies’ narrative made it very difficult to compare the possibility and likely consequences of a nuclear accident in France (as well as the prospect of political protests) with those of its European neighbors or Japan.

Conclusion This chapter raises questions regarding the ways in which global problems relate to specifically international vectors of politicization, such as the scale of adverse outcome, cross-border mobilizations, or cross-country comparisons. Investigating this dimension of global problems implies not only distinguishing between multiple definitions of the “global,” but also between the ways in which international and national actors participate

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in the construction of problems. In the case of nuclear accidents, the existence of transnational organizations has reduced the visibility of the international stakes in a highly controversial policy field. National organizations as “problem owners” and intermediaries adopt internationally available information and claims to their own contexts. The reduced visibility of the international stakes of nuclear energy is the result of the coordination and strategic communication of public officials, particularly in crisis situations, and, less directly, of discourses that reflect organizational mandates and responsibilities, for example by setting aside political disagreements. International and cross-border organizations may well participate in the “globalization” of problems, but they can also dislocate transnational conflict in non-public spaces to which journalists and critical actors may not have the same access. Acknowledgements The fieldwork on which this publication is based received financial support from the ANR project Agoras (ANR-11-RNSR-0001). I wish to thank all project members and partners for their support in fieldwork access. I also wish to thank the National Audiovisual Institute of France (INA). In addition, I am grateful to Olivier Borraz for his continuous supervision and support for this PhD research. Finally, I would like to thank Hadrien Clouet for his help in cross-checking my coding scheme.

Notes 1. For simplicity, we will refer to both as “government agencies” in this chapter. 2. The Chernobyl accident had profound effects on Western European energy policies and institutions, though these were not consistent with the distribution of radioactive contamination (Nohrstedt, 2008; Mez et al., 2009; Müller & Thurner, 2017). The Fukushima accident has tended to receive a lot of media attention without really affecting politics and institutions in most Western European countries or the United States, though it provided an important turning point in Germany (Hindmarsh & Priestley, 2015). 3. For further information, see: https://www.acpm.fr/Les-chiffres/Diffus ion-presse/Presse-Payante/Presse-Quotidienne-Nationale. 4. Inathèque is the database of the French National Audiovisual Institute. 5. The relative coverage refers to the share of news editions (newspaper or TV segment) that are devoted to the accidents. 6. After the Chernobyl catastrophe, reportage on the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna (May 2, 1986), France 2.

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7. Vienna, Chernobyl. After the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl, conference in Vienna (August 26, 1986), France 2. Transcript excerpt: “Russian and Western scientists meet in order to set up the summary statement of the catastrophe and put in place a common politics of prevention and reaction in case of a nuclear accident.” 8. Encounter of the IAEA member states. Two conventions should be signed to reinforce information and assistance in the case of a nuclear accident (September 25, 1986, Le Monde). 9. Retrospective of the “catastrophes” of 1986 (December 29, 1986), France 2. Transcript excerpt: “In the opening, the comet Halley (what a catastrophe!) and in conclusion the arduous ‘journey’ around the world (what a catastrophe!). Rapid mentions of the following catastrophes: the Challenger explosion (January 28, 1986), the failure to launch the Titan (April 18, 1985), the failure of Ariane (May 30).” 10. Chernobyl: demonstrations worldwide (April 26, 1987), France 2. 11. The crisis demonstrates the powerlessness of the International Atomic Energy Agency (March 17, 2011), Le Monde; The Troubling discretion of the World Health Organization, (March 19, 2011), Le Monde. 12. How is seismic hazard managed in France? (March 15, 2011), Le Monde; In France, a difficult reflection on the consequences of a nuclear accident. A “doctrine” is in preparation to manage the aftermath of catastrophe. 13. Can we phase out nuclear? Which scenarios are under study? The Fukushima catastrophe revives the debate on the security of the nuclear industry (March 16, 2011), Le Monde. 14. While this study shows that Le Monde and France 2 had generally consistent problem definitions of Chernobyl and Fukushima, Le Monde gave greater importance to economic issues, especially for Fukushima (no doubt because its economy section has developed over time), while on France 2, human-interest stories made up a greater part of the total coverage for both accidents. Perhaps surprisingly, technical safety issues were also covered extensively on France 2, despite seemingly not conforming to what television considers “newsworthy” (Bourdieu, 2011; Champagne, 1990; Le Grignou & Neveu, 2017). 15. The markets sacrifice the atom and acclaim green energies. The events in Japan caused a hype of investors (March 19, 2011), Le Monde. 16. Heavy uncertainties weigh on the international expansion of EDF. The consequences of the Japanese drama on the nuclear sector add up to a series of setbacks (April 1, 2011), Le Monde. 17. EEC measures (May 10, 1986), France 2. Transcript excerpt: “The countries of the EEC do not manage to find an agreement concerning radiation protection measures after the accident in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant”; New failure in Brussels: no new norms adopted (November 11, 1987), Le Monde.

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18. The 12 divided on energy policy objectives in Europe (June 5, 1986), Le Monde. 19. In a report to the EEC, European consumers ask for an independent organism for the control of radioactivity risks (April 22, 1987), Le Monde. 20. The European Parliament asks the USSR to reimburse the damage caused abroad (May 17, 1986), Le Monde. 21. The radioactive winds (May 2, 1986), Le Monde. 22. Consequences accident nuclear power plant (April 29, 1986 France 2). Transcript excerpt: “Shows a map of Europe with the travelling of the radioactive cloud towards the North. People wandering around in Finland. In Sweden, an apparatus measuring the radioactivity level.” 23. Chernobyl: Neighboring countries (May 12, 1986), France 2. Transcript excerpt: “After the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in the USSR, how was the public information organized in Northern European countries concerned by the radioactive cloud?”; The Chernobyl reactor would be shut down. Only France worry-free (May 10, 1987), Le Monde. 24. Anti-nuclear demonstrations in Europe (April 28, 1987), Le Monde; European anti-nuclear activists in Paris. Chernobyl, Chernobâle, Chernogent (June 23, 1986), Le Monde. 25. Fukushima crisis relaunches the debate on nuclear energy in Europe (March 14, 2011), France 2; European energy politics in Brussels (April 25, 2011), France 2. 26. “Extreme” tests for European reactors. The 27 will have to follow a common set of requirements to evaluate the resistance of their nuclear fleet (April 11, 2011), Le Monde. 27. Brussels urgently convenes nuclear actors. The European Energy commissioner advocates for a “coordinated response” (March 16, 2011), Le Monde. 28. Nine months to test the safety of European power plants. The safety authorities make propositions, each state remains responsible for their audit (March 26, 2011), Le Monde. 29. Nuclear safety: tensions between Paris and Brussels. The report of the Commission on the state of European reactors underlines the weaknesses of the French fleet (October 3, 2012), Le Monde. 30. The visit of chancellor Helmut Kohl in Paris. The industrial disputes weigh on the Franco-German political return (September 9, 2011), Le Monde. 31. German fears and rigorousness (June 20, 1986), Le Monde; Irradiated milk (February 13, 1987), France 2; Emergency abortions (May 13, 1986), Le Monde. 32. Radioactivity Federal Republic of Germany (May 8, 1986), France 2. Transcript excerpt: “After the nuclear catastrophe in the Chernobyl power plant, reportage on the Franco-German border on the differences in

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34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

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behavior of urban dwellers and authorities, be it on one side of the border or on the other.” The Chernobyl accident and the anti-nuclear movement in the Federal Republic of Germany. The clashes in Wackersdorf wounded 400 people in two days (May 21, 1986), Le Monde; German demonstrations (May 19, 1986), France 2. Transcript excerpt: “Violent demonstration in Bavaria at Wackersdorf camp in response to the Chernobyl accident.” The Greens radicalized (May 20, 1986), Le Monde. A Ministry will be in charge of the security of nuclear power plants (June 5, 1986), Le Monde; The Brokdorf power plant has started its operations (November 10, 1986), Le Monde; German Federal Republic: serious case of corruption in the nuclear field (December 24, 1987), Le Monde. For France 2, the coding of the Inathèque database indicates that none of the TV segments referring to Fukushima addresses the German phaseout decision. Although it cannot be excluded that this political decision is mentioned in the evening news without explicit reference to the Fukushima catastrophe, it remains negligible compared to Chernobyl, coded according to the same principles. Mrs. Merkel takes over German energy policy. The German chancellor brought together scientists and industrialists of the sector on Wednesday, 2 May (May 3, 2012), Le Monde. The German government suspects a double game (March 28, 2011), Le Monde. In Germany, the “big four” of the energy sector do not adapt easily to the end of nuclear power. E.ON, RWE and Vattenfall sell assets and reduce employment, EnBW is struggling (March 14, 2013), Le Monde; The Germans E.ON and RWE renounce the British energy market. Areva loses a potential market (March 31, 2011), Le Monde. In Germany, the multiplication of power interruptions is a concern for the industry. The companies ask the government to invest quickly in the development of the network (January 7, 2012), Le Monde. Interview with a ministerial representative of an anti-nuclear member state, participating in the Western European Nuclear Regulators Association working groups, 2017.

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References Arnhold, V. (2019). L’apocalypse ordinaire. La normalisation de l’accident de Fukushima par les organisations européennes et internationales de sécurité nucléaire [The ordinary apocalypse. The normalisation of the Fukushima accident by European and international nuclear safety organizations]. Sociologie du Travail, 61(1). Axelrod, R. (2006). The European Commission and member states: Conflict over nuclear safety. Perspectives. Review of International Affairs, 26, 5–22. Best, R. (2010). Situation or social problem: The influence of events on media coverage of homelessness. Social Problems, 57 (1), 74–91. Blanchard, P. (2010). Les médias et l’agenda de l’électronucléaire en France. 1970– 2000 (Doctoral dissertation). Université Paris-Dauphine, France. Boudia, S. (2007). Global regulation: Controlling and accepting radioactivity risks. History and Technology, 23(4), 389–406. Bourdieu, P. (2011). On television. London: Polity Press. Brouard, S., & Guinaudeau, I. (2017). Nuclear politics in France: High-profile policy and low-salience politics. In W. Müller & P. Thurner (Eds.), The politics of nuclear energy in Western Europe (pp. 125–156). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carpenter, D. (2010). Reputation and power: Organizational image and pharmaceutical regulation at the FDA. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Champagne, P. (1990). Faire l’opinion: Le nouveau jeu politique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Gamson, W., & Modigliani, A. (1989). Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: A constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology, 95(1), 1–37. Gusfield, J. (1981). The culture of public problems. Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gusfield, J. (1996). Contested meanings: The construction of alcohol problems. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hecht, G. (2006). Negotiating global nuclearities: Apartheid, decolonization, and the Cold War in the making of the IAEA. Osiris, 21, 25–48. Hecht, G. (2012). Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hindmarsh, R., & Priestley, R. (2015). The Fukushima effect: A new geopolitical terrain. London: Routledge. Kaijser, A., & Meyer, J. H. (2018). Nuclear installations at the border. Transnational connections and international implications: An introduction. Journal for the History of Environment and Society, 3, 1–32. Le Grignou, B., & Neveu, E. (2017). Sociologie de la télévision. Paris: La Découverte.

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Le Renard, C. (2018). The Superphénix fast breeder nuclear reactor: Crossborder cooperation and controversies. Journal for the History of Environment and Society, 3, 107–144. Mez, L., Schneider, M., & Thomas, S. (Eds.). (2009). International perspectives on energy policy and the role of nuclear power. Brentwood: Multi-Science Publishing. Müller, W., & Thurner, P. (2017). The politics of nuclear energy in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nohrstedt, D. (2008). The politics of crisis policymaking: Chernobyl and Swedish nuclear energy policy. Policy Studies Journal, 36(2), 257–278. Roehrlich, E. (2016). The Cold War, the developing world, and the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 1953–1957. Cold War History, 16(2), 195–212. Tauer, S. (2012). Störfall für die gute Nachbarschaft? Deutsche und Franzosen auf der Suche nach einer gemeinsamen Energiepolitik (1973–1980). Bonn: V&R Unipress. Topçu, S. (2013). La France nucléaire: L’art de gouverner une technologie contestée. Paris: Seuil.

CHAPTER 7

Same Topics with Different Meanings? Social Networks and the Trans-Nationalization of Issues and Frames in European Public Policy Agendas Franca Roncarolo and Sara Bentivegna

Introduction Under what conditions does an issue become a shared problem and an object of attention beyond its national borders? When this happens, does the substance of the conflict remain the same or is it reframed to reflect domestic concerns? We know that, alongside growing drives toward the integration of agendas, national priorities persist (Hafez, 2007) and that there is a significant tendency for shared issues to be domesticated (Clausen, 2004)—in whole or in part—through contrasting frames for their contextualization (Guo, Holton, & Jeong, 2012). However, there

F. Roncarolo (B) University of Turin, Turin, Italy e-mail: [email protected] S. Bentivegna University of Rome, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_7

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exists as yet no systematic reflection on the mechanisms underlying these processes. In the following paragraphs, we intend to contribute to the discussion of these matters by adopting an interdisciplinary perspective focussing on certain specific aspects. In the first place, starting from the assumption that transnationalization takes shape as a long-term multidimensional “process of structural transformation rather than episodic fluctuation” (Wessler Peters, Brüggemann, Königslöw, & Sifft, 2008, p. 9) we focus on the European context as one that is already structurally organized, exploring the emergent discursive space shared between the member states. This will allow us to analyse better both the pressure toward the integration of national agendas and what explains the different amounts of attention attracted by the various issues. We discuss the relationship between long-term tendencies toward the integration of agendas, and specific examples, reflecting on the transformations of the media system and analysing two referendums with transnational implications. This decision was dictated by the growing profile of referenda in the last twenty years both globally (Butler & Ranney, 1994) and in Europe (Uleri & Gallagher, 1996) and by the predilection of the media for bipolar confrontation, with the drama of zero-sum conflict reducing the complexity of politics to a simplified alternative. One can therefore anticipate that, in an international context of increasingly interrelated agendas (Chalaby, 2005), referenda will attract considerable attention. In what follows, this analysis will be undertaken with reference to two events of differing prominence on the European agenda: the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 and the referendum which, at the end of the same year, saw Italian citizens consulted on the constitutional reform proposed by the then prime minister, Matteo Renzi. It goes without saying that the Brexit referendum represents the paradigmatic case of a national event which came fully onto the shared agenda of the EU member states thanks to the significance of the issues at stake and the implications of the choice before voters. As we shall see, the limits on the processes of trans-nationalization, but at the same time the strong tendency for agendas to be shared, is confirmed by the analysis of primary data relating to the Italian case. Even a referendum which

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would once have had a limited echo beyond its national borders generated significant cross-national attention, but the limits on the extent to which it was shared are even more significant. We divide the chapter into two parts. The first briefly outlines the theoretical framework guiding the analysis, focussing on the main assumptions set out in the literature and the principal features of the public debate generated by the UK referendum as identified by scholars who have discussed it. In the second, we analyse the public debate surrounding the Italian referendum of 2016 considering the evidence deriving from Twitter messages posted by two different linguistic groups: Italian and English.

Construction and Circulation of the Problems in (Partially) Shared Discursive Spaces The European Public Sphere as a Prototypical Transnational Discursive Arena The formation of supranational political organizations, such as the European Union, and the emergence of “discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states” (Fraser, 2007, p. 7), have long pointed to the existence of transnational public spheres (Cammaerts & Van Audenhove, 2005). Naturally, authors have been aware of the critical implications of concepts such as the public sphere, “implicitly informed by a Westphalian political imaginary” (Fraser, 2007, p. 8). Without going into this debate,1 it will be useful for the purposes of our analysis to recall the approach developed in relation to the European experience, which has the merit of looking at transnational phenomena in their complexity and detail. Underlying the approach has been the attention paid to the process of Europeanization of the various national public spheres (Koopmans & Erbe, 2004), that is the growth of shared elements within the framework of different national systems. According to some, Europeanization consists in the progressive “parallelisation” of national public spheres, leading them to place at the center the same issues, debating them simultaneously and according them similar importance. However, according to others, in addition to this first level of sharing, two further conditions must be satisfied. First, there must be similar frames of reference. Second, those who take part in the debate, like those who follow it in the

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various national arenas, must be willing to recognize each other as “legitimate participants in a common discourse that frames the particular issues as common European problems” (Risse & Van de Steeg, 2003). These conditions in turn, we suggest, are the result of a range of further conditions associated with the salience of the issues in each national context and for the member states generally. A useful contribution in this connection is the classification suggested by Koopmans and Erbe (2004) starting from the evidence that Europeanization varies along two dimensions, vertical and horizontal, giving rise, in turn, to four types. Vertical Europeanization reveals the connections between the national and European public spheres, distinguishing between pressures from the bottom up and those exerted from the top down. More precisely, vertical Europeanization of the bottom up type takes place when national political actors (such as politicians, journalists, and so on) refer to European institutions or discuss issues relating to the common European agenda. Vertical Europeanization of the top down kind, on the other hand, takes place when European institutional actors intervene in the policy decisions and in the public debate of the individual member states in the name of the rules and common interests of the European Union. Horizontal Europeanization in contrast consists in the connections between the European Union’s various member states and distinguishes them in terms of their intensity. Weak horizontal Europeanization takes place when the media of a European country cover the events and the political debates going on in other member states. Strong horizontal Europeanization on the other hand takes place when the political actors of the European countries intervene directly in the national political debate going on in another member state. Naturally, the horizontal and vertical integration of national public spheres into a broader European discursive space can—at least in principle—be reinforced by the presence of social platforms. Transnationalization, Intermedia Agenda-Setting and Digital Platforms in the New Hybrid Media System In order to understand the conditions under which wholly or partly shared problems emerge in the European discursive space, it is also necessary to ask about the direction in which the mechanisms of agenda setting have changed. Green-Pedersen (in this volume) explored party

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agendas. Here, we must consider that the drives (and the resistance) to the construction of a shared transnational agenda have taken place in the context of a complex media ecosystem which has seen increased integration alongside the persistence, and in some respects the reinforcement, of asymmetries. With regard to the dynamics driving communicative integration, the processes of Europeanization are interlinked with two powerful drivers of change. First, integration among the member states has brought with it the consolidation of networks between the various national media and the journalists engaged with them, with significant effects in terms of the multiplication of exchanges, the sharing of approaches, the progressive Europeanization of contents and even the partial homogenization of professional cultures (Koopmans & Pfetsch, 2006; Meyer, 2005). Second, the so-called media hybridization (Chadwick, 2017) produced by digitalization, has brought the convergence among legacy media and digital media. The questions that require asking are three in number. The first two concern the elements of continuity and discontinuity discernible in the process of intermedia agenda setting, that is, in the processes concerning the construction of news as an effect of the interaction between various journalistic environments and different media.2 The third focusses on the contrasting evidence concerning the promise of democratization of access that came with the advent of the social media. Many authors have emphasized that in the definition of news—and thus in the construction of problems—the relationship between traditional and digital media is not unambiguous. We know, for example, that in the context of platform society (Van Dijck, Poell, & De Waale, 2018) the digital media have modified the process of agenda setting. They have changed the very notion of news, rendering more inclusive the definition of information sources or producers of news (Sayre et al., 2010) and offering journalists new instruments for gathering breaking news, trends, and issues (Hermida, 2010). Authors have also recognized the new opportunities to influence the agenda given by the digital media to political outsiders and civic actors previously confined to marginal positions by the traditional media (Pfetsch, Miltner, & Maier, 2016). Despite this, the legacy media remain important actors in agenda setting, both in their traditional form and through their online channels (Vonbun, Königslöw, & Schoenbach, 2016).

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With regard to the role of the traditional media in the transnationalization of public spheres, the literature offers contrasting evidence. While it is often argued that the Internet makes it possible to extend debate beyond national boundaries, the empirical evidence shows the limits to this process. Some, for example, have emphasized the way in which the Internet has made possible “the mediation of interactive discussion and debate” on themes of global relevance (Cammaerts & Van Audenhove, 2005, p. 184; Hänska & Bauchowitz, 2019). Castells, meanwhile, has argued that the new media system, and in particular, the social spaces of the Web 2.0, have been essential for the formation of a new global public sphere (Castells, 2008, p. 90). In contrast, Curran, Esser, Hallin, Hayashi, & Lee (2017) have drawn attention to the limits of the change pointing out that the advent of the Internet has not fundamentally changed the domestic focus of political and social debate. From Issues to Frames: The Contents of Public Discourse The last aspect worth considering concerns the contents of communication and especially the two dimensions highlighted as central by agenda setting theory: issues and frames. With regard to issues, the most important aspect is the issue’s proximity to the citizen’s concerns (Van Aelst & Walgrave, 2016). Scholars have discussed this measure (– which is also a measure of the potential influence of the media –) in reference, first, to a distinction between obtrusive and unobtrusive issues. Taking their cue from Zucker’s “obtrusiveness” hypothesis (1978), they have suggested that the more citizens directly experience a particular issue—which is therefore obtrusive—the lower is the influence of the media. Conversely, the less their first-hand experience, the more the media can arouse the public’s attention with strategies highlighting problems. Second, among the issues of which the public does not have direct experience, it is useful to distinguish between more concrete and more abstract matters. Combining the two characteristics produces an interesting typology. Beside the more concrete issues, close to personal experience, over which the public has the greatest control, there may be issues which are “concrete with tangible consequences for the population” (Walgrave, Soroka, & Nuytemans, 2007, p. 820), but which are outside the direct experience of many citizens. These are more open to the journalistic steering of public attention (McLaren, Boomgaarden, & Vliegenthart, 2017).

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Despite the widespread interest in agenda setting theory, the link between the obtrusiveness of the issue and the devices needed to place them on the agenda has not been fully explored. We know, for example, that turning to data and experts helps to justify a particular problem. And we are aware that entrepreneurs play a major role in all of this (Neveu, 2015).3 But what if the problem has a high level of abstraction? The process of framing—and re-framing (see Surdez, in this volume)— plays a decisive role in this. Briefly, frames are mechanisms that make it possible to conceptualize a theme or event by selecting and emphasizing some aspects rather than others. According to Entman (1993, p. 52), to frame is to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation (italics in original) for the item described.” Criticized for “the lack of conceptual clarity” (de Vreese, 2012) and a lessthan-rigorous use of the concept of frame itself (Cacciatore, Scheufele, & Iyengar, 2016), the research on framing nevertheless offers some fruitful suggestions. Two typologies in particular are useful for our purposes. The first distinguishes between issue-specific frames—which characterize issues and events in terms of their time-specific qualities—and generic frames (de Vreese, 2005), which in contrast present them in more general terms. This happens, for example, in the “framing of politics as a strategic game […] characterized by a focus on questions related to who is winning and losing, the performances of politicians and parties, and on campaign strategies and tactics” (Aalberg, Strömback, & de Vreese, 2012, p. 163). This distinction sits alongside another, which differentiates between advocacy and journalistic frames. Advocacy frames are “frames that are brought forward by different proponents in a political debate” (de Vreese, 2012, p. 367). Journalistic frames are “often more subtle, and rather than offering an alternative frame to one proposed by a political party […] their framing is more apparent in the playing-up, neglecting, or juxtaposing advocacy frames” (ivi, 367). In the context of Twitter, where numerous subjects—political spokespersons, journalists, supporters, ordinary users— coexist and interact, the distinction between the two frames proposed by de Vreese has the advantage of reducing the complexity of framing without undermining its descriptive value.4 For this reason, in this chapter we shall refer to this typology, deploying it, where necessary, alongside the descriptive elements deriving from the other typologies.

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Between National Agenda and International Implications: The Brexit Referendum Starting from the premise that “media agenda building is dependent not only on the strength of discourse coalitions in the online world: but also on media-, country-, and issue-specific settings” (Pfetch & Adam, 2011), the theoretical frameworks discussed above offer a useful repertoire for analysing the 2016 Brexit referendum, an important example of the construction of a transnational public problem. The referendum on British membership of the EU is an especially useful object of study both because of the objective importance of the vote for the European policy agenda, and because of the campaign, whose passion stimulated not only the highest turnout for a British referendum (72%), but also the highest for any national vote since the 1992 General Election. Both factors encouraged considerable transnational attention especially within the member states, making Brexit an almost paradigmatic case. By its nature, the referendum was an example of the processes of vertical Europeanization of both the bottom up and the top down type. The vertical dialogue between the British government and the European Union was joined, on the horizontal plane, by transnational attention to the issue and exchanges between the member states (Oliver, 2016). Alongside the opinions formed within the circles of media insiders, there emerged a progressively broader public debate. Bijsmans and his co-authors (2018) have documented this. They trace the curve of attention in a number of European public spheres, confirming that the issue enjoyed months of continuous but limited coverage before reaching a peak just prior to the referendum destined to give it a high profile. Their study explores the representations of Brexit in three newspapers in France, Germany, and Holland between January 2013 and June 2016. They find, first, that beside the national implications of the referendum for each of the countries in question, there was “a clear transnational dimension in the meanings given to ‘Brexit’” (Bijsmans, Galpin, & Leruth, 2018). However, these reflected, not a single current of opinion, but parallel currents running alongside each other. There was a trans-nationalization of the support for Europe, common to all three countries, emphasizing shared values and the prospects for a common future. However, there was also a trans-nationalization of Euro-critical identities (Statham & Trenz, 2012) linking the positions of conservatives

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and populists in Germany and Holland and fuelling, with the British criticisms, the sense of public malaise. Second, the relationship between the two currents changed with the passage of time. If, before the referendum, the Eurosceptical frame found space in the German and Dutch public debate thanks to the prospect of a British exit, as the day of the referendum drew near and especially after the vote, all three daily newspapers were united in placing at the center of their reporting the frame of risk, above all for the UK. Similar findings emerge from other research. For example, the study carried out by Krzyzanowski ˙ (2019) shows how, in a sample of newspapers in Austria, Germany, Poland, and Sweden before and after the referendum, the crisis frame was used to interpret the threatened divorce between the UK and the EU. This research too5 suggests that the transnational perspective was at least partly differentiated. On the one hand, in fact, the crisis frame is inflected within a range of specific dimensions, which, from time to time, are applied to the UK, to the international context and to the European arena. On the other hand, ideological orientations inform the debates highlighting the taking of positions and generating interpretations shared cross-nationally. There emerges a picture in which—alongside a significant tendency to interpret the common theme from a domestic perspective—what prevails is the transnational perspective fed by the fears of a crisis felt in various ways in the past and projected into the future. No less important, but more focussed on the conflict frame, is the trans-nationalization revealed by Ballmann (2017) who investigated the discussion of Brexit on three transnational information platforms— Deutsche Welle, France 24, and Al Jazeera English—in the months after the referendum. Ballmann does not say so, but it seems reasonable to assume that the media logic contributed significantly to the clear prevalence of the conflict frame in the medial arenas. It is difficult to deny that a percentage of conflict frames ranging from 55 to 66% reflects—besides the controversial nature of the issue itself—a journalistic predilection reported and documented by many analyses (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). It is emblematic that such tendency is fully shared by all three platforms, while other indicators are less clear. Especially important in this regard are the platforms’ different approaches to the transnational significance of the UK referendum. On the one hand, 67 and 66% of the items on the German and French platforms, respectively, chose to present Brexit in a framework emphasizing international interdependence. On the other hand, Al

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Jazeera English preferred to place national issues and internal, British, views at the center of its coverage, reserving to the transnational dimension a smaller, but still significant (46%), proportion of news items. This is probably to be explained by the fact that while the choice of frames is one dictated by journalistic routines and organizational imperatives (Bartholomé, Lecheler, & de Vreese, 2015), the adoption of a broader or narrower perspective depends on other elements of context, especially the existence of shared interests. In other words, in the case of Brexit, membership or otherwise of the European community makes a difference in terms of the pressures for a transnational treatment.

A National Political Issue Reinterpreted on the International Political Stage: The Italian Constitutional Reform Referendum of 2016 The Italian constitutional referendum of 2016 was obviously very different from Brexit in many respects. In the first place, there was an obvious difference in terms of the event’s European significance. At the heart of the Italian referendum, there was a typically national issue: reform of the institutional architecture promoted by the Renzi government. This could not have the same degree of centrality to the member states’ shared public agenda. Nor, consequently, could it have the same capacity to trigger processes of vertical and horizontal Europeanization. Moreover, it seems obvious that the UK referendum, as a high-salience—and in some respects obtrusive—issue, was fundamentally different from the Italian referendum, which, from the perspective of the ordinary citizen was of much less immediate-term significance.6 There were, however, a number of important similarities. In both cases, acrimonious campaigns led to the radicalization and polarization of opinion, which, in the UK case, saw the mobilization of populist forces, and in the Italian case was encouraged by the strategy of the then premier Renzi of transforming the constitutional referendum into a referendum on his leadership. This led, in both cases, to unusually high turnouts. If, as we have seen, the passion aroused by the choice between Leave or Remain resulted in a turnout of 72.2%, then the Italian referendum of 2016 “was the constitutional referendum with the highest rate of participation to date (65.5%), compared to turnouts of 34 and 53%, respectively, in 2001 and 2006” (Ceccarini & Bordignon, 2017, p. 281).

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In the end, the Italian referendum too had a considerable international echo thanks to the positions for or against the Prime Minister’s proposal adopted by a number of high-profile actors. As was pointed out, in fact, “Somewhat surprisingly, several outside key actors issued their support for Renzi and his ‘ambitious, courageous’ constitutional reforms: JP Morgan and Fitch, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, late in the day the Süddeutsche Zeitung (while the Economist sharply criticized the constitutional reform), the US ambassador in Rome and US President Barack Obama in Washington, though somewhat tepidly, the president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her powerful Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble, and French President François Hollande” (Pasquino & Valbruzzi, 2017). The constitutional referendum thus became a transnational issue, of interest both to Italians asked to vote and to those who—as observers— followed events from afar, being interested in and/or worried about their possible consequences. Detailed evidence is to be found in the coverage of numerous international publications—which, at certain moments, were even able to focus public attention on specific issues7 —as well as in references to the referendum in Twitter conversations. Research Questions and Hypotheses In the Twitter environment, the trans-nationalization of an issue gives rise to a conversation among a wide range of widely dispersed actors. These include representatives of the so-called legacy media (both of the issue’s country of origin and of the countries interested, for various reasons, in its development) and political actors (likewise belonging both to the country in which the issue arose and to those concerned about its possible consequences). They also include supporters of the various forces in contention, and ordinary citizens—in their capacities as both voters and observers. In short, the Twitter environment is an expression of the new hybrid media ecosystem. Precisely because of this hybrid quality, our research focusses on the Twitter conversations in Italian and English on the issue of the referendum. We have studied the frames used in these conversations by formulating the following research question: RQ : In what ways do frames in the Italian and English Twitterspheres differ in covering the Italian constitutional referendum?

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The hypothesis—supported especially by the literature on the use of frames in election campaigns (Aalberg et al., 2012)—is that the activity of framing in the two different linguistic contexts does not produce an unambiguous interpretative framework. It is, in fact, highly plausible that when elections are held there is intense campaigning activity on the part of the politicians involved and on the part of supporters of the various positions. It is equally plausible that the citizens of other countries who follow the event closely take on, less frequently, the role of supporters. Besides this difference among citizens, due account must be taken of the degree of centrality of the media narratives devoted to the topic, which was unquestionably classifiable as an “unobtrusive issue” (Zucker, 1978), one geographically and politically distant from many of the citizen observers. Obviously, this does not imply reintroducing an automatic distinction between individual and media frames (Scheufele, 1999). In the new media ecosystem, the dualistic has given way to the hybrid conception of frames, a result of the interaction and cross-fertilization of the two dimensions. It is precisely because we recognize this conception of frames that we have formulated the following hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 (H1): Among the frames identifiable in the conversation in Italian, there is a significant presence of advocacy or specific frames. Hypothesis 2 (H2): Among the frames identifiable in the conversation in English, there is a significant presence of media or generic frames. Hypothesis 3 (H3): Game framing, typical of electoral competitions, is present to a significant extent in both the conversation in Italian and the conversation in English.

Data and Methods We focused on the conversational space developed on Twitter, in both Italian and other languages,8 around the issue of the referendum. The 166,561 tweets—127,504 in Italian and 39,057 in English—registered in the week from 29 November to 5 December were analysed. More specifically, we analysed all the tweets containing the hashtags #referendumcostituzionale, #bastaunSi, #iovotoSi, #iovotoNo, #iodicoNo, #italyreferendum. We first carried out an analysis of the metadata provided by Twitter’s application programming interface (API), identifying the tweets’

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formats, classifying their authors9 and constructing a typology of the destinations of the links10 (when present). Then, given the impossibility of analysing such a large corpus of data by hand, we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which starts from the assumption that “the words of each document arise from a mixture of topics” (Blei & Lafferty, 2006, p. 147). Topics consist of a collection of relevant words that indicate a presence of significant themes. By applying LDA,11 we identified the topics present in the two corpora, then we proceeded to identify the frames, taking account of the fact that when LDA is “applied to corpora that cover particular issue domains […], topic modeling has some decisive advantages for rendering operational the idea of ‘frame’ in media research—such as […] facilitating discovery of unanticipated frames, and distinguishing between different use of the same term” (ivi, 593). As mentioned, our analysis is informed by the typology of frames proposed by de Vreese (2012), who distinguishes between advocacy frames and media frames, as well as the game frames typical of electoral competitions, and contextual or informational frames. The purposes of the latter aim to provide impartial information (such as, where to vote, how to vote, and so on). One Issue, Multiple Frames The comparative analysis of the two groups of tweets confirms both the presence of a significant degree of sharing in the context of transnationalization of the debate, and the emergence of emblematic differences. An initial aspect worth pointing out is the shape of the two curves showing the amount of attention paid to the referendum in the week leading up to the vote. As Fig. 7.1 shows, the two curves are highly correlated, notwithstanding the obvious difference in the number of tweets providing information, reflection, and opinions on the referendum in the Italian as compared with the English Twittersphere. Thanks to the considerable transnational interest12 aroused by the referendum and the common media logic informing its reporting, rises and falls reflect the campaign schedule and events in both cases. What stands out is the growing interest in the outcome of the referendum of 4 December 2016. Interest was heightened by the passion aroused by the competition, a phenomenon typical of contemporary media systems, but there is something more. It is indeed significant that the two Twitterspheres re-echo

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40000 35000 30000 25000 20000 15000 10000 5000 0 29-11-2016

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05-12-2016

Fig. 7.1 Change in the number of tweets devoted to the Italian constitutional referendum, in the Italian and English Twitterspheres, 29 November–5 December 2016

in unison the voices that drew attention to the international debate, stimulating an animated discussion, especially in the Financial Times, which the wave of tweets both promptly registered and re-launched. Between the end of November and 1 December 2016, the considerable international attention was heightened by the numerous interventions on the part of Italian politicians and international opinion writers who, in newspapers and on social media platforms exchanged views about what was really at stake in the referendum, generating alarmist interpretations (Newell, 2016) about the implications of the vote.13 However, there were numerous differences. In the Italian-language Twittersphere, the construction of the discourse around the referendum was the fruit,14 above all, of the contribution of ordinary users followed by activists— engaged in supporting the campaigns for and against the proposed changes—and representatives of the media (journalists and newspapers). In the English-language Twittersphere15 in contrast activists, as expected, had a decidedly marginal role, while the media played a more significant part, reacquiring a role of intermediation in relation to far-off events whose significance was unclear. There were links present in 12.8% of the tweets in Italian and in 88.6% of those in English. In the Italian context, when the conversation was

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constructed by making use of links, these pointed to material made available by representatives of the media, by a range of activists and supporters (that is, individuals and committees set up to support each campaign) and by political actors (individuals or party actors). In short, the public discourse created was the fruit both of a “mediated reading of the media” and of the direct participation of the citizens and political actors involved in the campaign.16 In the English-language Twittersphere, on the other hand, the public discourse was constructed almost exclusively by the journalists and media outlets engaged in rendering comprehensible an issue that was particularly complex in terms of the way it was formulated, but very simple in terms of its possible consequences (Table 7.1). This result was largely anticipated given the large distance separating ordinary users from the event, but it was one that inevitably influenced the nature of the coverage. The nature and direction of such influence emerge clearly when we consider the substance of the tweets published. Tables 7.2 and 7.3 show the first eight words most strongly associated with each topic both in the Italian- and in the English-language Twittersphere. Starting with the topics emerging in the Italian-language Twittersphere, it is immediately apparent that the terms associated with each of them contribute to the identification of precise themes, ones revolving around a highly polarized political campaign, fought with the same degree of intensity by those in favor of and those opposed to the constitutional reform Table 7.1 Links in the Italian- and English-language Tweets Associations, groups Activists, supporters Politica sources (Italian) Italian media and journalists Non-Italian media and journalists Ordinary users Public personalities, experts Other

Italian Twittersphere

English Twittersphere

2.2

0.7

18.2 17.3

– 0.4

46.2

0.7

0.4

77.2

2.9 2.5

2.1 1.4

10.3

17.3

Referendumcostituzionale Voto Vota Votare Perché Iovotono Fa Girare

Iovotosi

Riforma Votate

Ora Grazie Scheda Solo democrazia

No

Iovotono Referendumcostituzionale Dicembre Iodicono Ecco Perché Costituzionale

Topic 3 Vota e fai votare no

Topic 2 Vota e fai votare sì

Topic solution in Italian Twittersphere

Topic 1 La difesa della democrazia contro l’autoritarismo: la scelta del no

Table 7.2

Via Salvini Matite Poll Prima

Referendumcostituzionale Riformacostituzionale DP

Topic 4 Pointless babble

Matteorenzi Paese Cambiare futuro Vince

Bastaunsi Italia

Iovotosi

Topic 5 La retorica del cambiamento: la scelta del sì

Oggi Dicembre Domani Vittoria Renzi

Referendumcostituzionale Maratonamentana Costituzione

Topic 6 Lo spettacolo del voto

Cosa Votato Governo Ore Dopo

Referendumcostituzionale Renzi Affluenza

Topic 7 Risultati del voto

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Table 7.3 Topic solution in English Twittersphere Topic 1 Renzi, the loser that has to resign

Topic 2 Referendum puts Italy’future at stake

Topic 3 Polls and electoral forecasts

Topic 4 Referendum’s consequences on the EU

Topic 5 Topic 6 Tecnical The populist information wave about the referendum

Renzi Defeat Polls Italianprimeminister Reform Resign Future

Vote Referendum Renzi Italians Fate Makes Europe

Result Turnout Projection Campaign Referendum Change Frantic

Italy Bank Loss Europe Voters Euro Complete

Referendum Future Vote Crunch Scooter Guide Stake

Referendum Sunday Fall Populist Results Italy Future

proposals. The clearest evidence of the polarization of the conflict and of the public debate is given by the presence of topics 1 and 3 (in support of a no vote) and 2 and 5 (in support of a yes vote). Whenever expressions of support for a no vote were present, present also were elements (such as “ecco” (that is) and “perché” (because)) indicating arguments supporting such a choice. When, on the other hand, expressions of support for a yes vote were predominant, the personal character of the referendum campaign was confirmed and the rhetoric of change was reiterated (“ora” (now), “futuro” (future), “cambiare” (change)). The other topics that emerged (6 and 7) described the vote by referring to the turnout and the result as well as the coverage of the traditional media (“maratonamentana”17 ) (Mentana’s marathon). Lastly, topic 4, brought together voters’ comments concerning some of the campaign actors (the DP and Salvini) and such aspects of the voting process as the clandestine circulation of polling data and allegations of fraud arising from the use of pencils containing lead that could easily be erased. The tweets published in English had a completely different profile. In this case, there were virtually no elements contributing to the campaign for one side or the other, and a predominance of those interpreting the referendum outcome as problematic (“defeat,” “fate,” “loss,” “fall”). Here, Europe and the fate of Italy in the event of a defeat for premier Renzi were at the heart of the conversations, as were the political space created for the growth of populist forces and the consequences for the Euro. Worries about the future dominated the contributions, and though

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not directly mentioned the trauma created by the Brexit referendum was taken as a point of reference and comparison. In short, the interpretive dimension was clearly predominant. Before considering the frames associated with the individual topics, it will be useful to examine the weight of each topic to get a sense of the “overall climate” characterizing the two contexts. In the case of the tweets in Italian, the greatest weight is attributed to the topic identifying the narratives built around the reasons for voting no (value 1), while in the case of the tweets in English, the greatest weight is registered by the political consequences of the vote (value 1). This characterization of the two Twitterspheres can be investigated further in terms of the frames used. Again, there is no doubt about the differences between the two universes: in the Italian-language Twittersphere the advocacy frames predominated, in the English-language Twittersphere, the journalistic frames. It is interesting to note that the competition between the two sides was also reflected in the juxtaposition of the advocacy frames in favor of each side with an obvious prevalence of the front calling for a no vote. In addition, the outcome of the vote and the power of the hybrid media logic to structure discussion in the digital sphere gave a high profile to game framing (Tables 7.4 and 7.5). The reading of the frames emerging from analysis of the Englishlanguage Twittersphere offers a completely different picture: in this case, journalistic frames predominated followed by game frames. The adoption of such frames ensures that the specific issues at stake in the Italian referendum are lost from sight and give way to journalistic narratives—based Table 7.4 Topics and frames in Italian twittersphere Topic

Description

Frame

Weight

1. La difesa della democrazia contro l’autoritarismo: la scelta del no 2. Vota e fai votare no 3. Lo spettacolo del voto 4. Risultati del voto 5. Pointless babble 6. Vota e fai votare sì 7. La retorica del cambiamento: la scelta del sì

Storytelling del no

Advocacy

1

Appello al voto/mobilitazione Metacoverage Risultati elettorali e commenti Espressivo/partecipativo Appello al voto/mobilitazione Storytelling del sì

Advocacy Game Game Individual Advocacy Advocacy

0.93 0.91 0.84 0.83 0.55 0.46

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Table 7.5 Topics and frames in English Twittersphere Topic

Description

Frame

Weight

1. Referendum puts Italy’s future at stake 2. Renzi, the loser who has to resign 3. Polls and electoral forecasts 4. The populist wave

Political consequences of the vote Winners and losers

Journalistic

1

Game

0.86

5. Referendum’s consequences for the EU, and the financial markets 6. Technical information about the referendum

Results and voting predictions Game Referendum and the populist Journalistic threat Economic consequences of Journalistic the vote

0.82 0.58

Description of referendum issues and voting procedures

0.49

Contextual

0.56

on the habit of interpreting events in the individual member states from the perspective of Europe as a whole—and gaming models, in terms of which the essential point is who wins and who loses. The interpretive component was clearly predominant in a context in which local perspectives were completely crowded out by European and supranational ones. Through such an operation, the victory of the no side in the Italian referendum became the occasion for reflecting on the economic and political future of Europe as well as on the already certain future of the referendum’s loser (“Renzi, the loser”). The combined analysis of the topics present and of the frames used to discuss them provides empirical support to the idea that the constitutional referendum of 2016 was discussed in sharply different ways in the Italianlanguage and the English-language contexts. The only exception was the use of game framing, whose association with election campaigning was confirmed, even though the referendum was a sui generis event giving life to political alliances often cutting across traditional party and ideological affiliations18 (Dekavalla, 2016; Usherwood & Wright, 2017). In conclusion, through referring to the same event, describing the same actors and commenting on the same results, the emerging story differed considerably, highlighting the relevance of the interpretive communities in the two contexts as well as the extent and the nature of media hybridization.

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Conclusions The analysis carried out in this chapter has confirmed that while there are drives toward the trans-nationalization of public discourse in the European arena, there are also limits to it. Alongside the tendency to share issues—associated in various ways and to varying extents with processes of Europeanization—there is also a tendency to domesticate them, reducing them, on the one hand, to the agenda of priorities within each nation state and on the other to the shared horizon of European concerns. The transformations brought about by the emergence of a hybrid media system and the expansion of public discussion to the social media platforms have not been powerful enough to bring about significant change in this respect. On the one hand, they contribute to the transnationalization of the debate, placing non-obtrusive and more abstract issues on national political agendas. On the other hand, as suggested by the analysis of two linguistically distinct Twitterspheres at the time of the Italian constitutional referendum, the digital media do not seem to have generated an authentically greater degree of sharing. On the contrary, the most unifying elements appear, once again, to be those dictated by the powerful media logic shared with the legacy media. In short, even in a relatively integrated context like the European one it seems that while citizens are paying increasing attention to issues important in other national contexts, they are—on closer inspection— continuing to view them from their own perspectives. While they are informed about them through narratives reflecting logics that are largely shared, they are continuing to view them according to their own order of priorities.

Notes 1. For a useful analysis of the European public sphere as a media and political construction, see Baisnée (2007). 2. Briefly, “Intermedia agenda setting is the mechanism creating a common definition of what is news and what is not” (Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2008, p. 861), driven by the organisational imperatives of the media system.

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3. In order to have a deeper analysis of the agenda setting process see Nollet (in this volume), who highlights the construction of public problems by looking at the relationship between journalistic, political and administrative fields. 4. See also Neff (in this volume) for an analysis of Twitter that looks at issues and frames. 5. Using the method of discourse-conceptual analysis, the research analysed 3720 articles from liberal, pro-European newspapers, and conservative, moderately pro-European (Euro-realistic) newspapers, gathered in the four-month period from 1/8/2016 and 31/8/2016. 6. “The Renzi-Boschi Reform […] was a complex text amending 47 articles of the second part of the Italian Constitution, dedicated to the institutional architecture of the Republic” (Ceccarini and Bordignon, 2017). 7. In the months preceding the vote on 4 December, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and The Economist published several articles on the Italian referendum aimed at emphasising the risks of instability that would arise nationally and in Europe in the event of a no victory (Financial Times, 26/06/2016, Wall Street Journal, 13/08/2016). The Economist, fell in behind a “no” vote because the reforms proposed by Renzi were, in its view, not the ones the country needed (The Economist, 24/11/2016). 8. The material downloaded included tweets in both English and French. The latter were excluded from the analysis because of their limited number. 9. Users were classified as ordinary users; Italian political sources; activists, supporters; associations, groups; media; public personalities, celebrities; news gatherers, blogs; other. 10. Links were classified as ordinary users; Italian political sources; activists, supporters; associations, groups; Italian newspapers; foreign newspapers; public personalities, celebrities; other; nc. 11. The distinctive feature of LDA is its capacity to offer “an automatic procedure for coding the content of a corpus of texts (including very large corpora) into a set of substantively meaningful coding categories called ‘topics’”. Moreover, what distinguishes LDA from traditional analyses aimed at counting the number of appearances of terms in a text, is that it reveals co-occurrences, aimed at recording the relations between words (Di Maggio, Nag, & Blei, 2013; Mohr & Bogdanov, 2013). 12. It is significant, for example, that the London School of Economics created, in the area of its website dedicated to European Politics and Policy, a specific section devoted to the “2016 Italian constitutional referendum.” There, along with analyses and opinions in favour of Yes and No votes, it posted the results of various research projects. These included the one directed by H. Kriesi who, at the European University Institute,

158

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

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“launched a study with the aim of understanding how Italian voters are making up their minds on such a salient, but also technical and complex issue” (Kriesi & Grande, 2016). See, among the many worried analyses that circulated on the other side of the Atlantic, Adam Taylor’s piece, ‘Italy’s Brexit moment? The complex constitutional referendum that could rock Europe’, Washington Post, 30 November 2016. See also Paolo Gentiloni, ‘Stability and reform are at stake in Italy’s referendum’ (29/11/2016) and Francesco Giavazzi, ‘A No vote in the Italian referendum will derail essential reforms’ (1/12/2016), both in the Financial Times. James Politi, ‘Tensions rise as business weighs Renzi reforms’ (30/11/2016) and Matteo Salvini, ‘Renzi’s reforms leave Italy’s real problems untouched’ (2/12/2016) also appear in the Financial Times. The contributions of ordinary users amounted to 76% of the total; those of activists and supporters, 9.3%; those of the media and journalists, 8.6%; those of political sources, 3.4%; those of public personalities, 1.1%; those of associations and groups, 0.7%; those of other actors, 0.9%. In this case, the contributions of ordinary users amounted to 56.6% of the total; those of the media and journalists, 20.6%; those of Italian media and journalists, 0.9%; those of public personalities, 3.3%; those of associations and groups, 1.4%; those of activists, supporters and political sources, 0.5%; those of other actors, 5.7%; those from unclassifiable sources, 10.5%. The high value for the “other” category was due to the inclusion of the accounts of commercial and/or productive enterprises; accounts no longer reachable; accounts that could not be placed in any other category. “Maratonamentana” is a television show hosted by a famous journalist. The show airs in occasion of special events (such as elections) and, sometimes, it lasts for hours (even 12). For example, the Five-star Movement and Salvini’s League found themselves side by side calling for a “no” vote in the referendum.

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CHAPTER 8

Claims-Making and Transnational Spaces: Contesting the Scope of Climate Change Discourse on Twitter Timothy Neff

With decades of scientific evidence linking the use of fossil fuels to potentially catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate, negotiators from 195 countries gathered in Paris in late 2015 for talks aimed at arriving at an agreement to mitigate climate change. The two weeks of negotiations during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) produced an agreement to limit the global increase in average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius (UNFCCC, 2015). Focusing on discourse that formed around the Twitter hashtag #COP21 during the talks, this chapter examines how actors with different agendas and from different social fields expand the scope of discourse to encompass broader issues surrounding the negotiations. Such discursive shifts in “claims making” (Best, 2013) can articulate the talks with specific

T. Neff (B) Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_8

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agendas in order to gain resonance in varied contexts, such as nation-state or group (value) contexts. The analysis of Twitter’s “hashtag publics” therefore offers insight into the contested and dynamically unfolding meanings and diffusion of social problems (Rambukkana, 2015). Expanding the scope of discourse to broader issues beyond the talks also can open the door to, though certainly does not guarantee, forms of civic participation that Carvalho and Peterson (2012), drawing from Mouffe (2005), categorize as “agonistic pluralism” (p. 8). Carvalho and Peterson emphasize that the arena of political contestation over climate change must remain open to conflict and difference due to power differentials and uncertainties involved in addressing a problem with multiple dimensions and unequal impacts. Discourse articulating the climate negotiations with broader social contexts can draw attention to power differentials related to the socially stratified dimensions of climate change. This chapter analyzes how “hashtag-mediated discursive assemblages” (Rambukkana, 2015, p. 2) potentially include or exclude these dimensions by producing different forms of claims-making.

Climate Change: A Global Problem Discussed in Transnational Spaces Climate change has been the topic of extensive study as a human-driven, physical phenomenon that nonetheless is socially constructed in arenas of contestation (Aklin & Urpelainen, 2013; Jang & Hart, 2015; RebichHespanha et al., 2015; Schlichting, 2013; Shehata & Hopmann, 2012; Trumbo, 1996). As Fligstein and McAdam (2012) have pointed out, sociology commonly draws upon analytical constructs such as fields, arenas, or sectors to understand the social structuring of power and action, and such distinctions commonly are reflected in research on climate change and media flows (Aykut, Comby, & Guillemot, 2012; Boykoff, 2009; Eide & Kunelius, 2012; Grundmann, 2007; Sonnett, 2010). A social field represents shared cognitive and symbolic dimensions of social problems, which can inform specific claims and solutions.1 Social construction processes related to climate change, including COP21, produce discourses that can roughly be divided between aggregate social categories or fields, such as politics, economics, science, and civil society (Aykut et al., 2012; Kunelius & Yagodin, 2017). However, social media such as Twitter are common platforms for information flows that blur boundaries, including boundaries between fields,

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cultures, nation-states, and public and private realms. The specific affordances and dynamics of these networked sites play important roles in configuring “networked publics” that share and co-construct identities, interests, and other collective imaginaries (Boyd, 2011). Twitter users who include hashtags in their tweets may be considered “ad hoc publics,” forming and dispersing along with events in real time (Bruns & Burgess, 2015). These hashtagged events unfold dynamically as ad hoc publics contribute new information and claims. Research focusing on hashtags inevitably excludes a portion of the conversation around relevant events, and the use of hashtags often denotes a degree of experience or expertise on Twitter (D’heer & Verdegem, 2014; Larsson & Moe, 2011). Analyses of #COP21 tweets have provided insight into climate policy negotiating blocs and the ways that NGOs can influence Twitter discourse by staging protests and working their way into the center of discussions (Sylvestre, 2016). These dynamics of networked forms of communication have influenced new models of public spheres, in which non-state actors deliberate in order to leverage political action (Castells, 2008, 2010; Habermas, 1991, 1996; Olesen, 2005; Volkmer, 2003). Volkmer (2003) posits that in an age of diverse flows of news, the global public sphere “is increasingly transformed by new ‘differentiated’ segmented ‘microspheres’” (p. 13). Olesen (2005) has argued that global social movements are constituted by a plurality of transnational publics that do not act but “are better thought of as social spaces with specific infrastructures” (p. 425). Like ad hoc “hashtag publics” (Rambukkana, 2015), these transnational spaces tend to be temporary, coming and going as issues and events warrant rather than persisting as structural components of society. Additionally, the concept of a specifically transnational public sphere raises questions about the legitimacy and efficacy of deliberative processes that transcend the nation-state. As Fraser (2007, p. 15) has asked, “can we still meaningfully interrogate the efficacy of public opinion when it is not addressed to a sovereign state that is capable in principle of regulating its territory and solving its citizens’ problems in the public interest?” Yet for all of this attention to global flows of communication, Neveu (2017) has noted that research to date on the international diffusion of public problems is limited. Neveu argues that in order to understand how problems move across borders, sociology must “focus on claim-makers, identify the individuals, institutions, or groups that mobilize to define a fact or behavior as a problem requiring action” (p. 9). Claims-making is

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the “core” activity of interaction through which problems are defined and recognized (Spector & Kitsuse, 1977, p. 78). Research on claims-making seeks to understand how issues are defined as social problems on public agendas and who is involved in their diffusion within and across social, cultural, and nation-state boundaries. With regard to how a problem is defined, Best (2013) has elaborated a tripartite rhetorical structure of claims-making in which “grounds are statements about the nature of the problem, warrants justify taking action, and conclusions explain what the actions should be” (p. 31; author’s emphasis). Warrants can involve connecting a social problem to other issues or transcendent ethical frameworks, such as arguing that there is an ethical consideration for future generations that warrants acting on long-term environmental risks. This symbolic work of connection or articulation is central to the diffusion of social problems: Different grounds and warrants can support different actions or conclusions favored by claims-makers within different social fields, including what Haas (1992) has called “epistemic communities” that share problem definitions and expertise. For example, when economists define climate change as a problem for markets and argue that action is warranted by potential climate-related financial losses, such grounds and warrants may generate market-based conclusions about what should be done to mitigate climate change.2 This work of structuring claims-making is central to what Neveu (2017) refers to as a “third flow” of problem diffusion: a “cognitive and symbolic” dimension of frames and narratives that is just as crucial for the internationalization of problems as their materiality and the people and institutions advocating action (p. 21). With regard to who is making claims in an era of network flows, abundant research has emphasized that even if Internet access and networked sites constitute some degree of democratization of public discourse (Benkler, 2011; Boykoff & Yulsman, 2013), such discourse is far from nonhierarchical (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2016; Fuchs, 2014; Hindman, 2008; Hladík & Štˇetka, 2017; Song, 2015). Network amplification effects mean that the ability to be heard and, therefore, diffuse claims about social problems on networked sites is more related to cultural, economic, and other forms of capital than it is to access. Strictly speaking, the Paris climate talks known as COP21 sought to reach an international political consensus on action to mitigate climate change, and the talks themselves were intensely focused on issues of language in draft texts leading up to that conclusion (Aykut, 2017). This

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chapter identifies discourse most immediately related to the negotiations as engaging with COP21 on a micro-level. This micro-level discourse is inextricably linked to macro-level issues and values that may diverge among a multiplicity of social fields and networked communities within and beyond the talks. Claims-making about climate change is most likely to be evident in an expansion of the scope of discourse to encompass issues and values that inform grounds, warrants, and conclusions (Best, 2013). However, given the highly heterogeneous nature of networked sites such as Twitter, it is unclear whether the shared cognitive and symbolic dimensions of social fields will be evident in claims-making among networked publics. My research questions are: RQ1: To what extent does #COP21 discourse remain at the level of the negotiations (micro-level) rather than expanding to broader issues and frameworks surrounding the negotiations (macro-level)? RQ2: Which actors are most likely to contribute to this expansion of scope: state actors (national or transnational political actors) or non-state actors found in various social fields, such as economics, science, and journalism, and a broad, activism-dominated field that this chapter refers to as “civil society”? RQ3: Does the rhetoric of claims-making differ among these categories of actors, and if so, how does it differ?

Methodology In 2016‚ I purchased from DiscoverText3 a historical archive of more than 2.3 million tweets produced during the 13 days of the Paris talks, from 30 November 2015, to 12 December 2015, and that included a URL link and the hashtag #COP21. The corpus in this analysis is based on 13 subsets of these tweets, each composed of 50,000 tweets produced at the height of each day’s Twitter activity. The tweets are not limited to any single geographic location, and the subsets thus constitute global snapshots of discourse in many languages, though English is the dominant language, followed by French and Spanish.4 I analyzed these 13 subsets of tweets using a Python script developed for research on Twitter communities that formed around the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter (Freelon, 2017; Freelon, McIlwain, & Clark, 2016). The Python script finds the largest 10 clusters or “communities,” in the

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loosest sense of the word, in a dataset of tweets. Retweets and account mentions on Twitter establish relationships between tweets that produce these communities. The script also reveals the top retweets within each community as well as the Twitter account with the highest in-degree, meaning that it is the subject of the most retweets or mentions. A central Twitter account with a high in-degree isn’t necessarily directly involved in a community’s discourse. An account often is central because it is frequently retweeted, in which case it is benefiting from the amplification of its messages by other Twitter users. The top five most-retweeted tweets in each of the 10 communities found for each of the 13 days, as well as their central community Twitter accounts, were manually coded for the presence of topics, as well as for Twitter users’ social fields. The coding scheme identifies actors according to fields identified in previous research on the social construction of climate change: politics, economics, science, and civil society5 (Aykut et al., 2012; Kunelius & Yagodin, 2017). A total of 650 tweets were included in this manual content analysis, and coding reliability tests on a 10% subsample were found to be satisfactory, with most variables meeting a simple agreement (Holsti’s method) of at least 84%. However, agreement on topics reached 78.5%. The coding scheme for topics was derived from a topic model analysis of U.S. and U.K. news accounts of the Paris talks (see Neff, 2020). This algorithmic method identified 20 topics, or bundles of associated words found in a corpus of news texts. By analyzing news texts highly associated with each topic, it is possible to give each topic a name that indicates its focus or subject, such as “renewable energy,” “sea levels,” and “developing nations.” However, it is challenging to apply these topics to tweets, which are limited in length and often lack sufficient context for identifying a single topic out of a list of 20. Therefore, references to conclusions drawn from measures of topics in this chapter should be considered tentative, as indicated by a Krippendorff’s alpha score of .762 for this variable (Krippendorff, 2004, p. 241). Word clouds also were created using the text of all tweets within each actor category. These word clouds, produced via an online word cloud generator,6 in combination with a qualitative examination of tweet texts, help produce a taxonomy of discourse produced by actors from these fields.

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Findings Organizations rather than individuals dominate tweets in #COP21 Twitter communities. Organizations constitute 75.1% (488) of the mostretweeted tweets in these communities. Twitter inclusion rates for politics are 46.5% of all retweeted users; civil society, 32.3%; journalism, 13.1%; economics, 5.8%; science, 1.1%. The rates for accounts at the center of communities are very similar. Thus, economics and science, and to a lesser degree journalism, are marginal fields in #COP21 discourse on Twitter, while the fields of civil society and politics have much higher profiles. Topics The “climate negotiations” topic is most prevalent among #COP21 tweets. This is a micro-level topic directly reflective of the political event at the center of these 13 days but often with little specificity about the talks. This topic includes tweets about livestreamed COP21 events, new draft texts of the agreement, and general comments about the talks. Its dominance of Twitter topics to some extent reflects the constraints of Twitter’s 140-character limit,7 which challenges nuanced, detailed analysis, or commentary on specific issues related to COP21. “Appeals for action,” a topic often featuring celebrity appeals for a positive outcome from the negotiations, was the fifth-most prevalent topic in these #COP21 communities (6.9%) but last in prevalence in U.S. and U.K. news coverage. These 20 topics, excluding “other/unclear” tweets, can be divided into expressions of the negotiations and of the issues surrounding them. There are four negotiations or “talks” topics: “climate negotiations,” focusing on official events and drafts of texts; “national climate pledges,” focusing on nation-state promises to reduce their carbon emissions; “developing nations,” focusing on negotiations over financial aid to developing nations to help them transition to cleaner sources of energy; “Paris agreement,” a topic that only appears on the final day of COP21 and largely features tweets lauding the agreement. Other topics tend to draw the focus away from the talks and toward broader issues and events surrounding them, such as “renewable energy,” “global emissions,” “sea levels/ice melt,” “social justice,” “protests,” and “appeals for action.” As can be seen in Table 8.1, topics related to the micro-level of the talks tend to dominate #COP21 communities.

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Table 8.1 Topic rankings in #COP21 communities

Topics on Twitter (by retweet)

Number of retweets/percent of all retweets (%)

1. Climate negotiations 2. World leaders 3. Other/unclear 4. Paris agreement (tie) 4. Renewable energy (tie) 5. Appeals for action 6. Protests 7. Urban policies 8. Social justice 9. Forests & agriculture (tie) 9. Global emissions (tie) 9. Human impacts (tie) 10. Fossil fuels 11. Developing nations 12. National emissions 13. Sea levels/ice retreat 14. Climate skepticism (tie) 14. Energy investments (tie) 14. National climate pledges (tie) 15. China air pollution 16. U.S. politics

140 (21.5) 78 (12) 74 (11.4) 50 (7.7) 50 (7.7) 45 (6.9) 38 (5.8) 30 (4.6) 22 (3.4) 19 (2.9) 19 (2.9) 19 (2.9) 14 (2.2) 12 (1.8) 9 (1.4) 7 (1.1) 6 (0.) 6 (0.9) 6 (0.9) 5 (0.8) 1 (0.2)

Table 8.2 brings into relief the struggle between the fields of politics and civil society to define COP21. Accounts in the field of politics are more likely than accounts in other domains to generate linkages to retweets focusing on talks topics, while accounts in the field of civil society most often generate linkages to retweets focusing on non-talks topics. Chi square tests show this difference to be statistically significant at p < 0.05. Figure 8.1 breaks down the distribution of instances of #COP21 politics and civil society speakers across all 20 topics. The field of politics on Twitter clusters around the two micro-level talks topics of “Paris agreement” and “climate negotiations,” and a third topic, “world leaders,” which often references speeches made by heads of state on the first day of COP21. Much of this clustering occurs around

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Table 8.2 Central Twitter account fields, cross-tabulated by topics in retweets circulating in the communities centered on those accounts Central Twitter account field Journalism Economics Science Politics Civil society

(N = retweets)

Talks topics

Talks percentage (%)

Non-talks topics

Non-talks percentage (%)

66 23 5 310 172

21 8 1 130 48

31.8 34.8 20.0 41.9 27.9

45 15 4 180 124

68.2 65.2 80.0 58.1 72.1

Fig. 8.1 Topic distribution of retweets by Twitter users from fields of civil society and politics (percentages)

Twitter activity by official U.N. accounts, heads of state, and other world leaders. Twitter users from civil society also strongly cluster around “climate negotiations,” but they tend to amplify macro-level topics such as “renewable energy,” “fossil fuels,” and “global emissions,” as well as topics like “protests” and “appeals for action” that directly link the talks to such broader issues. Three topics that generated substantial news coverage during COP21 rarely appear among politics and civil society

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tweets using the #COP21 hashtag: “China air pollution,” related to smog alerts in Beijing and other Chinese cities; “climate skepticism,” related to expressions of doubt about climate change or its underlying causes; “U.S. politics,” related to speculation that Republicans in Congress would be unlikely to accept an international agreement to curb climate change. Hashtag Dynamism The following three network graphs, drawn from tweets at the beginning, middle, and end of COP21, show the top 10 communities on each of these three days as nodes that are to varying degrees connected. These community nodes represent clusters of tweets, and they are labeled to show: (1) the Twitter account with the highest in-degree within the community, in parentheses; (2) the social field of this central Twitter account. Community nodes are sized according to the in-degree of the central Twitter account. Figures 8.2 through 8.4 offer a sense of how social fields attracted attention during the talks. Tweets from the field of politics dominate the first day of the talks (Fig. 8.2), which featured a series of speeches

Fig. 8.2 Top ten communities on 30 November 2015

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by world leaders inaugurating the two-week effort to achieve a climate agreement. Twitter accounts for UNFCCC (@unfccc), President Obama (@barackobama and @potus), COP21 (@cop21), European Union offices (@presidencia_eu and @juncker_eu), and the official account of the city of Paris (@paris) generated large numbers of retweets and mentions, amplifying the topics that they were broadcasting with the #COP21 hashtag, often the “world leaders” topic. News accounts also proved somewhat less attractive, with actors from the field of journalism found at the center of three small communities: @mashable, @eldiarioes, and @rt_com.8 The network graph for Sunday, December 6 (Fig. 8.3) reflects an active weekend in the middle of COP21. Communities centered on Twitter accounts from the field of civil society gain in prominence this day, which features an indigenous rights protest and celebrity appeals for action. The account of film star Leonardo DiCaprio (@leodicaprio) is found at the center of a large community dominated by tweets about

Fig. 8.3 Top ten communities on 6 December 2015

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his meeting with U.N. chief Ban Ki-Moon on “Action Day” at the negotiations; laudatory comments from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres about DiCaprio’s support for climate action; and DiCaprio’s promotion of a U.N. Foundation message urging action (“climate negotiations” and “appeals for action” topics). Other communities with civil society actors at their center are dominated by tweets calling for people to send messages demanding action to negotiators and world leaders (@climatereality) or touting solar energy (@greenpeace) (“world leaders” and “renewable energy” topics). Renewable energy also was a prominent topic in a community centered on an economics actor, Virgin CEO Richard Branson (@richardbranson). Nonprofit news outlet Democracy Now! (@democracynow) drew attention for its coverage of the indigenous rights protest (“protests” topic). Figure 8.4 is a network graph of communities that formed on the final day of COP21, when world leaders and negotiators announced the final agreement. The “Paris agreement” topic dominates this day in the

Fig. 8.4 Top ten communities on the final day of COP 21

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news and on Twitter. Politics-centered #COP21 communities have a very large footprint at this moment, and the mood is overwhelmingly celebratory. Tweets from the U.N.’s main account circulate in the community centered on the @unfccc account, calling it a “joyful moment” and a “decisive turning point.” Discursive Diversity It is possible to construct a taxonomy of claims-making by actors from these different fields, but it is important to bear in mind the high degree of diversity both within and across social fields in #COP21 Twitter discourse. This taxonomy, based on qualitative analysis of all 650 tweets in the corpus, including an analysis of word clouds generated by these tweets, distinguishes between actors, but examples of each type of messaging can be found across different fields. I also have divided political actors into national and transnational categories, as has prior research on climate negotiations (Eide & Kunelius, 2012). In terms of the rhetorical structure of claims-making, actors across all fields frequently cast the talks against a backdrop of planetary crisis by claiming that Earth as a whole is out of time and cannot abide any further delay in political action to combat climate change. This dominant framing took root prior to the actual talks (Aykut, 2017). Much of this discourse resembles the “warrant” dimension of Best’s (2013) rhetorical structure of claims-making: Urgent action is warranted at COP21 because time is running short to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Often, however, such claims do not significantly expand the scope of discourse away from the talks, as a planet in imminent peril is perhaps the most generic symbol of climate change. Benabou, Moussu, and Müller (2017) have noted that generic discourse facilitates a multilateral mode of consensus-building by obscuring specific agendas and points of disagreement. Despite such overlap, claims-making evidences differentiation by social field. For example, claims-making among economics actors tends to focus more on what business and industry are doing to mitigate climate change than on planetary crisis. Top words in the word cloud for these actors include “business,” “sustainable,” “energy,” “world,” and “governments.” The discourse here is not in favor of regulation but rather in favor of governments creating a level playing field for sustainable economic

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activities. Morena (2016) identifies a market-friendly “liberal environmentalist” discourse with this view that states and regulators are change facilitators, while businesses are change actors (p. 128). According to a tweet from the @richardbranson account, governments must “set the rules so business can take on climate change.” Here, climate change is at least in part defined as a problem of and for markets, though a strong warrant for action may be somewhat undercut if part of the claim is that climate change already is being addressed through market mechanisms. Claims-making by science actors, of which there are only a few in the corpus, tends toward factual statements about climate change, implicitly urging political action because, as the @nasa account states in linking to a livestreamed event, “arctic changes impact us all.” Top words in the word cloud include “arctic,” “Paris,” “CO2,” and “EarthRightNow,” which is a hashtag that often accompanies satellite imagery of Earth. Science actors thus tend to be more specific about planetary crisis but remain in a naturalistic mode focused on communicating how climate change is affecting the natural world. The focus is on connecting people to their natural environments in order to strengthen a warrant for action. Claims-making is less frequent among journalism actors and transnational political actors. Reflecting professional ideals of objectivity and neutrality, journalists most often tweet headlines and links to articles reporting on the progress of the talks or issues surrounding them. Tweets produced by transnational political actors focus on the process of arriving at solutions through political negotiations. A clear message is that it is urgent for negotiators to arrive at an agreement, which, as Aykut (2017) has pointed out, had been “ritually highlighted” by officials in the buildup to COP21 (p. 21). Much of the discourse from transnational political actors also involves system maintenance, such as announcements that new draft texts are available. Top words in the word cloud include “draft,” “Paris,” “today,” “new,” “world,” and “Ban” and “Kimoon,” referring to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Similar to transnational political actors, national political actors often focus on actions within the venue of the talks. However, national political actors also pay particular attention to which political actors have been meeting on the sidelines and how nation-states are taking action on climate change. This indicates a level of domestication of discourse. Top word cloud words include “Paris,” IndiaAtCOP21,” “GoCOP21,” “ActOnClimate,” “ParisAgreement,” and “world.” Many of these words are hashtags, including one dominated by messaging about India’s efforts

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to reduce carbon emissions and about its activities at the talks. Though both national and transnational political actors tend not to engage in explicit claims-making in these Twitter communities, national actors often invoke an implicit claim that they are taking effective action. This shifts the rhetorical emphasis of claims-making toward conclusions or solutions but without an extension of scope from the micro-level talks to macro-level issues surrounding the talks. Claims-making is widely variable among civil society actors, who demand ambitious action from governments, message about protests, champion solutions such as renewable energy, and criticize power imbalances that threaten the ability of the talks to reach a successful or fair conclusion. For example, a popular tweet from NGO @climatereality, founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, reads: “Retweet if you want governments to stand with people instead of big polluters.” Top word cloud words include “Paris,” “people,” “renewables,” “action,” “global,” “poorest,” and “fossil.” Compared to the focus on political process and solutions among national and transnational political actors, substantial expansions of scope are facilitated by civil society actors’ explicit and implicit invocations of human values as warrants for political action on climate change. Here, the discourse facilitates connections between the talks and macro-level considerations of social justice. Civil society actors often highlight power imbalances between rich and poor countries, as well as efforts by fossil fuel-intensive industries to block climate action. Exemplary is an @oxfam tweet claiming that “climate change & economic inequality are inextricably linked.” In this ethical register, warrants for mitigating climate change are articulated with common human values, potentially producing claims that are difficult to oppose, even though “what seems at first glance to be consensus may encompass different views” (Best, 2013, p. 41). Potentially obscured here are specific agendas for change, which in some cases may align with the increasing dominance of a push to reconcile policy and economic goals within the UNFCCC process (Benabou et al., 2017; Morena, 2016; Wei et al., 2016). For example, the “renewables” topic is common to both civil society actors such as @greenpeace and business actors such as @richardbranson.

Conclusions The fields of politics and civil society are most prone to the production of #COP21 communities, with communities centered on political actors

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more prevalent. Claims-making during the Paris talks primarily occurred with reference to this divide due to its obvious salience for the outcome of the talks. Ultimately, on the final day the rhetorical focus largely switched from warrants to conclusions, as the Paris agreement met with broad celebration from the assembled actors. The agreement itself amounted to an agenda or set of goals (UNFCCC, 2015), with much work remaining to be done to formulate a rulebook for implementing the conclusion arrived at in Paris. In terms of RQ1, micro-level Twitter topics such as “climate negotiations” are highly prevalent in #COP21 discourse (Table 8.1). In terms of RQ2, state actors from the field of politics tend to dominate these microlevel negotiations topics (Table 8.2 and Figure 8.1), while non-state actors, particularly those from the field of civil society, often bring to the fore macro-level topics at issue in the negotiations. At times, this expansion of scope provides flashes of agonistic pluralism, such as messaging that occurs around protests, but the role of celebrity often produces less agonistic interventions, particularly in the case of the celebrity-dominated “appeals for action” topic. Here the focus is less on contesting the power of political elites than on exhorting them to arrive at a final agreement by emphasizing that time is running out for the planet, a warrant that was part of official messaging in the run-up to COP21. Leonardo DiCaprio, dubbed an official “Messenger of Peace” by the U.N. (Reuters, 2014), played a leading role in these appeals during COP21. Thus, different visions of civil society’s role in transnational efforts to address climate change are evident in #COP21 ad hoc publics. With regard to RQ3, civil society actors expanding the scope of #COP21 discourse beyond the micro-level of the climate talks often introduce a subtle inflection to the rhetoric of claims-making by connecting warrants for climate action to an ethical terrain, rather than to a pragmatic terrain of economic or natural realism. Efforts to connect warrants for climate policy action to common human interests and values may provide conditions for diffusing civil society claims-making across national borders and epistemic communities. This inflection to civil society discourse also offers some evidence that the shared cognitive and symbolic dimensions of social fields play a role in shaping discourse among networked publics, though relationships between social fields and networked publics certainly beckon further research. However, the diversity of discourse among civil society actors also indicates a contested territory of competing problem definitions, warrants,

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and conclusions. Although expansions of scope related to different warrants for climate action may signal agonistic politics, when warrants are not clearly connected to definitions of the problem (grounds) and agendas for action (conclusions), dissent can be uncertain or even a mirage. This uncertainty surrounding dissent underscores that claimsmaking about climate change involves issues of legibility, which can challenge the legitimacy and efficacy of transnational public spheres (Fraser, 2007). A concern for multilateral consensus-building, which is deeply inscribed in the UNFCCC process, may contribute to such a challenge by encouraging genericized rhetoric (Benabou et al., 2017). Regardless, this analysis of Twitter discourse shows how warrants can be critical discursive moments within the rhetorical structure of claimsmaking for the contention and potential diffusion of claims about the social problem of climate change. Acknowledgements I thank Deen Freelon for help with using the Twitter Subgraph Manipulator Python module, which he designed, in this analysis. I also thank Tim Wood for his invaluable assistance with coding reliability tests.

Notes 1. I do not use the term “field” in this chapter strictly in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993, 1996) field theory or Fligstein and McAdam’s (2012) “strategic action fields.” The fields analyzed here are nonetheless compatible with views that social actors’ dispositions and interactions co-constitute and reproduce differentiated social domains. 2. This focus on market-based solutions has become a prominent framework within the UNFCCC process (Benabou et al., 2017; Morena, 2016; Wei et al., 2016). 3. www.discovertext.com. 4. Among tweets included in this chapter’s manual content analysis, 68.2% are written in English, 21.4% in French, and 10% in Spanish. 5. For the purposes of this chapter’s analysis, civil society is defined as a field of non-state actors such as NGOs, celebrities, and activists who observed or advocated political action during COP21. The fields of economics, science, and politics predominantly include actors and institutions with expertise and professional credentials specific to these fields. 6. www.jasondavies.com. 7. This limit was expanded to 280 characters in 2017.

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8. Though critics claim RT.com is an extension of the Russian state (Aleem, 2017; Dowling, 2017), its journalistic efforts are taken at face value for the purposes of categorization for this research.

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Bruns, A., & Burgess, J. (2015). Twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. In N. Rambukkana (Ed.), Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 13–27). New York: Peter Lang. Carvalho, A., & Peterson, T. R. (2012). Reinventing the political. In A. Carvalho & T. R. Peterson (Eds.), Climate change politics: Communication and public engagement (pp. 1–28). Amherst: Cambria Press. Castells, M. (2008). The new public sphere: Global civil society, communication networks, and global governance. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616, 78–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/000271 6207311877. Castells, M. (2010). The rise of the network society (2nd ed.). Malden: WileyBlackwell. D’heer, E., & Verdegem, P. (2014). Conversations about the elections on Twitter: Towards a structural understanding of Twitter’s relation with the political and the media field. European Journal of Communication, 29(6), 720–734. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323114544866. Dowling, T. (2017). 24-hour Putin people: My week watching Kremlin “propaganda channel” RT. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ media/2017/nov/29/24-hour-putin-people-my-week-watching-kremlin-pro paganda-channel-rt-russia-today. Accessed 29 November 2017. Eide, E., & Kunelius, R. (Eds.). (2012). Media meets climate: The global challenge for journalism. Göteborg: Nordicom. Flaxman, S., Goel, S., & Rao, J. M. (2016). Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80, 298–320. https:// doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw006. Fligstein, N., & McAdam, D. (2012). A theory of fields. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, N. (2007). Transnationalizing the public sphere: On the legitimacy and efficacy of public opinion in a post-Westphalian word. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(4), 7–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407080090. Freelon, D. (2017). Twitter subgraph manipulator—TSM. GitHub. https://git hub.com/dfreelon/tsm. Accessed 24 May 2019. Freelon, D., McIlwain, C. D., & Clark, M. D. (2016). Beyond the hashtags. Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University. http://www.cmsimpact.org/blmreport. Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media and the public sphere. TripleC (Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 12(1), 57–101. Grundmann, R. (2007). Climate change and knowledge politics. Environmental Politics, 16(3), 414–432. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010701251656. Haas, P. M. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination. International Organization, 46(1), 1–35.

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Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy (W. Rehg, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. Hindman, M. (2008). The myth of digital democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hladík, R., & Štˇetka, V. (2017). The powers that tweet. Journalism Studies, 18(2), 154–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2015.1046995. Jang, S. M., & Hart, P. S. (2015). Polarized frames on “climate change” and “global warming” across countries and states: Evidence from Twitter big data. Global Environmental Change, 32(5), 11–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.glo envcha.2015.02.010. Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. Kunelius, R., & Yagodin, D. (2017). Attention, access and the global space of interpretation: Media dynamics of the IPCC AR5 launch year. In R. Kunelius, E. Eide, M. Tegelberg, & D. Yagodin (Eds.), Media and global climate knowledge (pp. 59–80). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Larsson, A. O., & Moe, H. (2011). Studying political micro blogging: Twitter users in the 2010 Swedish election campaign. New Media & Society, 14(4), 729–747. https://doi.org/10.1177/146144811422894. Morena, E. (2016). The price of climate action: Philanthropic foundations in the international climate debate. Paris: Palgrave Macmillan. Mouffe, C. (2005). The return of the political. London: Verso. Neff, T. (2020). Transnational problems and national fields of journalism: Comparing content diversity in U.S. and U.K. news coverage of the Paris climate agreement. Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17524032.2020.1716032. Neveu, E. (2017). How do social problems and social conflicts travel across borders? Journal of Conflict and Integration, 1(1), 8–38. Olesen, T. (2005). Transnational publics: New spaces of social movement activism and the problem of global long-sightedness. Current Sociology, 53(3), 419–440. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392105051334. Rambukkana, N. (Ed.). (2015). Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks. New York: Peter Lang. Rebich-Hespanha, S., Rice, R. E., Montello, D. R., Retzloff, S., Tien, S., & Hespanha, J. P. (2015). Image themes and frames in U.S. print news stories about climate change. Environmental Communication, 9(4), 491–519. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2014.983534. Reuters. (2014). Leonardo DiCaprio named U.N. messenger of peace for climate. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-dicaprio-un-idU SKBN0HB29P20140917. Accessed 4 October 2018.

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Schlichting, I. (2013). Strategic framing of climate change by industry actors: A meta-analysis. Environmental Communication, 7 (4), 493–511. https://doi. org/10.1080/17524032.2013.812974. Shehata, A., & Hopmann, D. N. (2012). Framing climate change. Journalism Studies, 13(2), 175–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2011. 646396. Song, H. (2015). Uncovering the structural underpinnings of political discussion networks: Evidence from an exponential random graph model. Journal of Communication, 65(1), 146–169. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12140. Sonnett, J. (2010). Climates of risk: A field analysis of global climate change in US media discourse, 1997–2004. Public Understanding of Science, 19(6), 698–716. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662509346368. Spector, M., & Kitsuse, J. I. (1977). Constructing social problems. Menlo Park: Cummings Publishing Company. Sylvestre, G. (2016). Social network analysis of the 4.6 million #COP21 tweets. Data visualization & social network analysis. https://cartorezo.wordpress. com/2016/02/17/social-network-analysis-of-the-4-6-millions-cop21-twe ets/. Accessed 22 October 2018. Trumbo, C. W. (1996). Constructing climate change: Claims and frames in U.S. news coverage of an environmental issue. Public Understanding of Science, 5(3), 269–283. UNFCCC. (2015). Paris agreement. https://unfccc.int/files/essential_backgr ound/convention/application/pdf/english_paris_agreement.pdf. Volkmer, I. (2003). The global network society and the global public sphere. Development, 46(1), 9–16. Wei, D., Cameron, E., Harris, S., Prattico, E., Scheerder, G., & Zhou, J. (2016). The Paris agreement: What it means for business. We mean business. https://www.bsr.org/reports/BSR_WeMeanBusiness_Bus iness_Climate_Paris_Agreement_Implications.pdf.

PART III

Arenas and Venues: Bringing Scales, Frames and Temporalities Back In

CHAPTER 9

Rationalization, Privatization, Invisibilization? On Some Hidden Dimensions of the Transnationalization of Occupational Health and Traffic Safety Policies Stève Bernardin and Emmanuel Henry

What is a “transnational” public problem?1 The question is certainly stimulating and vividly interesting: it opens new research perspectives and acts as a catalyst to our social and political imagination. It can also lead, however, to shortcuts and difficulties, if not mistakes, in the analysis of problems considered as intrinsically transnational. The labelling of issues as international per se often prevents scholars from considering some basic processes in the definition of public problems. Even if an issue becomes global, it is still and in most cases remains a matter of social concerns, politics, scientific controversies, public health, or environmental hazards.

S. Bernardin (B) Université Gustave Eiffel, Champs-Sur-Marne, France e-mail: [email protected] E. Henry Université Paris-Dauphine PSL University, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_9

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It is of primary importance, for scholarly reasons as well as for social and political purposes, to treat it as such, and not to fall into the trap of considering international problems as de facto different from national or local problems. That is not to say that the processes of internationalization, transnationalization, or globalization are not to be taken into account. Claimsmakers can indeed be really different in international arenas or use an action repertoire that is not similar to those existing locally or at the national level. But this very dimension has to be analyzed in relation to many other dimensions of a given problem. It is now well-known that processes of internationalization are profoundly diverse and everchanging, with a good number of conflicts and often sequences of negotiations and renegotiations of the priorities at stake in public issues at that level (Boudia & Henry, 2015). This is a reminder that it is most important to not to forget about empirical fieldwork, as technical as it may seem, to shed light on the social processes at stake in transnational arenas (Neveu, 2017). The questions to ask ourselves, then, might seem quite mundane: who are the claims-makers and how do they share their view on public problems internationally? Muriel Surdez proposes an interesting answer to this question in this volume, when she insists on national bureaucrats and their ability to reframe the international issue of antibiotic resistance to fit their own professional practices. Armèle Cloteau, in another chapter of this book, focuses on private companies to emphasize the role of economic actors in the definition of the problems related to agrofuels at the international level. Both scholars shed new light on international politics, as they underline the day-to-day work of actors all too often underestimated as potential claims-makers. They emphasize some processes of bureaucratic rationalization and privatization already well-known at the national level (Culpepper, 2011). One might wonder, then, to which extent those processes are also crucial in international politics (Laurens, 2015).

From Transnationalization to Invisibilization: A Call for a Sociohistorical Analysis of Public Problems In this chapter we investigate two cases that highlight the processes at stake in the transnationalization of public problems. The first one relates to the field of traffic safety. It has already been studied in great detail by

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public problem sociologists in France and the United States (Bernardin, 2014; Gilbert, 2008; Gusfield, 1981). The other case study is the regulation of occupational exposure to chemicals through thresholds, which is less visible in the public sphere than is traffic safety, and has consequently been less studied as a public problem (Henry, 2017). The two problems share some common patterns. In particular, they share a same strong scientific and technical dimension related to engineering sciences for the design of cars and infrastructures, or toxicology and epidemiology for the study of the effects of work on workers’ health. At the national level, the problems of traffic safety and occupational health tend to become technical issues, addressed with increasingly complex instruments (Henry, 2015b), and individual problems, with people required to become responsible for their own practices (Gilbert, 2008). This process goes along with the invisibilization of some structural dimensions of those issues, as other research has already shown, on topics such as sustainable development and climate change (Comby, 2014; Freudenburg, 2000). In the field of occupational health or traffic safety, the questions related to work conditions or vehicle equipment tend to get a low degree of visibility from the media, and finally lose political salience (Gilbert & Henry, 2012). In other words, the problems do not become totally invisible to the public, but they are dealt with on the margins of public spaces (Murphy, 2006), most often by toxicologists, epidemiologists, statisticians, engineers, or more generally by specialized professional groups (Gusfield, 1989). This process has not been at heart of international studies of public problems, even if scholars have shown some similar trends in a comparative perspective (Culpepper, 2011). More precisely, we could not find any detailed analysis of a process of invisibilization of social issues that would explicitly refer to international practices in the fields of traffic safety and occupational health. It is our proposal, however, that the technoscientific dimension of the two issues provides specific outlines for transnationalization processes. Most importantly, it generates specific consequences on the definition of these problems at the international level, where programs have been developed to reduce traffic accidents (Bernardin & Grafos, 2009) and occupational exposure to chemicals (Henry, 2015a). The research perspective here goes along with a call for careful analysis of empirical sources in transnational history (Saunier, 2004). It leads to a special emphasis on some technical tools and choices all too often

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overlooked by international relations specialists, to underline the political weight of science and technology, considered as governing sciences in international arenas (Gardon, 2015; Payre, 2011). Such an analysis, we argue, can prove fruitful to study the internationalization of public problems. It is a reminder that an analysis of frequently neglected mundane technical practices can reveal some hidden political and social aspects of the process, likely to profoundly change our viewpoint on international relations (Katzarova & Neveu, in this volume). Indeed, even if we emphasize the institutionalization of bodies for negotiation and the production of expertise on traffic safety and occupational health, we do not claim to shed light on the creation of any homogeneous epistemic communities capable of exclusively structuring the issue (Haas, 1992). Instead, we are witnessing the implementation of different scales of definition and treatment of the issues with the maintenance of strong national particularities (Jasanoff, 2005; Demortain, 2017), and variations in the importance of the role played by the European Union (Robert, 2012). It is why we argue that it is of great importance to take scientists and technical claims into account, when we study the transnationalization of public problems, to understand what they help to make visible or invisible to both journalists and politicians. The analysis builds on archival material and interviews, in addition to second-hand literature accumulated over the past fifteen years on both traffic safety and occupational health. The aim, through the study of two examples, is to highlight some analytical difficulties that can arise from an uncontrolled use by scholars of the category of international problems and internationalization processes. More specifically, the article highlights scientists and engineers who were willing to build a common community to address the issues of traffic safety and occupational health, long before any international organization took charge of any of these problems. They structured the way in which bureaucrats dealt with the two issues later on, to rationalize and privatize public problems. This process was not without any political effect on national politics, as it contributed to preventing any redefinition of the two problems. It led finally to an invisibilization of structural causes for the two problems to happen. This result opens research perspectives to critically examine not only the routines of international bureaucrats, but also the scientific processes through which issues become visible and debatable, when, and for whom.

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Before Politics and Business: The Academic Genesis of Transnational Problems To understand the underlying reasons for the transnationalization of public policies related to road safety and occupational health, it is interesting to look at the actors and rationales that have led to these issues being addressed in transnational arenas. In both cases, these actors are primarily scientists or technicians, or experts in the issues at stake here, such as state engineers. From Gentlemen Drivers to State Engineers: Toward a Science of Traffic Safety At the very beginning of the twentieth century, technical experts were keenly interested in the automobile and its development. They organized several international meetings and congresses to discuss the issues related to this new mode of transportation. This type of internationalization is neither new nor limited to the automobile (Rasmussen, 1995), yet it is important to go back to those early days, when traffic safety became a matter of international concern, to emphasize the role of scientists in the framing of the problem. Transportation congresses initially developed under growing pressure from users’ associations, in the late nineteenth century. The first two international auto congresses, which took place at the private mansion of the Automobile Club of France, in 1900 and 1903, were followed by a third, in Milan in 1906. Sixteen hundred participants from 33 countries attended the First International Road Congress in Paris in 1908, under the sponsorship of French Minister for Public Works, Louis Barthou. The hosts were mostly technical engineers from national governments, who discussed no fewer than 100 technical reports disseminated prior to the congress. The main priority appeared in the technical reports: the quality of roads had to be greatly improved to allow for the expansion of road traffic (Parey & Sauterey, 2000). This goal ensured that technical experts would have their word in the meetings. It also kept the problems related to the automobile in line with an old tradition of civil engineering in France. As traffic developed, the issues expanded beyond scientific interest, to questions related to the government of transportation. That was how the experts came to work not only on problems related to individual drivers

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and their behaviors, but also on more structural issues connected to the regulation of the automobile in states and cities (Gardon, 2013). As experts expressed the need for a permanent setting to host their meetings, the Permanent International Association for Road Congresses (PIARC) was created in 1909. This association helped to consolidate the links between technicians from all over the world. Its members clearly expressed their main goal “to maintain and make stronger the links between the people interested in roads, to bring the results from research together, and to prepare the coming congresses” (PIARC, 1909). This mission, emphasized in a Second International Road Congress held in Brussels in 1910, was to be a longstanding one. It raised interest among state representatives from across the globe, with no fewer than 52 countries represented. Some experts from the industry attended the meeting, from road builders to car manufacturers, but they did not have a predominant voice in the debate at the time. Hence, the early international debates on traffic safety not only called on to science and scientists to address the issue; they were also framed after the model of an ideal academic debate, where disinterestedness and organized skepticism would prevail. International Congresses and Commissions: Limit Values Outside of Workplaces The situation paralleled that of the genesis of occupational exposure limits during the same period. Before their use in the regulations of various countries, limit values, used to manage and regulate exposures in the workplace, were based on scientific research on the effects of chemicals on human health. Systematic reflection on the production of lists of exposure limit values for occupational hazards developed mainly in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly within the Industrial Hygiene Department of Harvard University (Murphy, 2006; Sellers, 1997). It was in this very department, with research on lead exposure, that the transition took place from the factory to the laboratory and from the workers’ bodies to those of the laboratory animals—a transition that Christopher Sellers refers to as the Pax toxicologica. As he has shown, the proliferation of studies involving animals placed in exposure chambers constituted a central vector for depoliticizing the work of industrial toxicologists and hygienists who previously had measured the real poisoning

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of workers in their workplaces (Sellers, 1997). This scientific neutralization is crucial if we are to understand the success of limit values as a regulatory tool in the conflictual field of occupational health. Scientists thus worked to find out whether there were levels below which exposure to certain products could be less dangerous for humans. The transnationalization of this scientific research is linked to international exchanges between scientists working on the development of limit values from the very first studies on these issues in the 1920s and 1930s, quite simply because many of the promoters of these values were scientists already integrated into international networks as shown by the 1925 trip to the USSR by the founder of industrial hygiene in the United States, Alice Hamilton, professor at Harvard University (Sellers, 2013). The more systematic international dissemination of this instrument took place however from the post-war period onwards, through the circulation of lists of limit values. The list most used has been the threshold limit values first produced in 1946 by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), a professional association of hygienists based in the United States, and subsequently regularly updated (Corn, 1989; Paull, 1984). This list has become widely used until now in many countries and there is no doubt that the scientific definition of the values was a major factor of this dissemination. From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, international exchanges on these themes became more systematic. This was concomitant with the establishment of modes of government through thresholds in widely different fields (from nuclear security to food safety), as the idea of life in a toxic world became the norm. To avoid the banning of dangerous products, it was necessary to regulate their use and to manage exposure to them (Boudia & Jas, 2013; Boudia et al., forthcoming). Following a panel discussion at the International Commission on Occupational Health held in 1957 in Helsinki, several scientific meetings were organized on the issue of limit values. The International Symposium on Maximum Allowable Concentrations of Toxic Substances in Industry, held in Prague in 1959, brought together toxicologists and epidemiologists from both sides of the Iron Curtain to discuss the different ways in which limit values had to be developed (Devinck, 2011; Sellers, 2013). In the congresses related to limit values, as in the field of traffic safety, scientists were the ones to frame the issues to be dealt with by public authorities and private companies in the future. It would not seem accurate, then, to state that corporate actors “created” some international

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forums to discuss matters they wished to hide from public scrutiny. It was rather scientists and experts from a wide variety of organizations, including states and city services, who chose to meet to discuss the promises and perils of occupational health and the automobile worldwide. At that time, their purpose was to exchange ideas and gain knowledge from their academic peers, rather than to impose a single definition of traffic safety or limit value, even if a number of these experts were beginning to think of international harmonization as a goal to achieve. The creation of this international space for dialogue between experts was to play a crucial role in the next stages of the development of these issues.

When Institutionalization Rhymes with Privatization: A Sociological Viewpoint on International Harmonization The creation of an international space where experts could basically interact and discuss their views on occupational exposures to chemicals and traffic safety proved crucial in the institutionalization of both issues at the international level. It paved the way for the heads of newly created international organizations who wanted to build peace worldwide around the resolution of technical problems first and foremost. That was how the definition of the two problems slowly developed and expanded quite unobtrusively under the quiet supervision of new actors invited to take part in the debate, such as industrial experts and state representatives at the international level. The logics of academic research and scientific reasoning thus merged with some logics of privatization of public problems. This process did not lead to politization of the two issues; rather, it reinforced the power of experts over the definition of the problems to cope with, with a special emphasis on economic issues rather than social ones. Traffic Safety at the United Nations: Auto Makers and Their Experts on the Move In the field of traffic safety, the Permanent International Association for Road Congresses (PIARC) served as a foundational basis for future debates on traffic safety in the newly formed international organizations of the interwar period. Within the League of Nations, the theme of

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transportation, as a means to literally build bridges between countries, quickly became of major interest to decision-makers. It went along with the creation in 1924 of a special committee to regulate the development of the automobile worldwide, which became a Permanent Committee on Road Traffic in 1926. Its members were scientists and engineers, most of them affiliated with the PIARC. They organized in subcommittees to deal with technical matters, such as the international harmonization of road signals, licensing, or vehicle specifications. After World War II their work was confirmed and legitimized under the umbrella of the nascent United Nations. Thus, technical expertise developed at the heart of dayto-day UN activities, to foster teamwork between state representatives even before any political consensus was reached on more sensitive issues such as monetary policies, for instance. The priorities set at the time reinforced the need for experts and for technical committees to drive the reconstruction of Europe.2 Committees and subcommittees came to be known as “working parties,” whose members (mostly state representatives) used discretional powers to select and co-opt their own experts to discuss traffic safety issues. The idea was to allow continuity with the previous committees of the League of Nations, and therefore of the PIARC, as the working parties of the UN dealt with similar issues, such as road infrastructure, licensing, and vehicle specification. Their members did not however focus on academic research or scientific investigation per se; instead, they were in charge of the technical harmonization of road safety among a large number of countries. It led them to frame the issues at stake as inherently technical. The drive to institutionalize traffic safety at the UN therefore translated into a trend to rationalize not only the diagnosis of the problem, but also of its political treatment at the international level. To better understand the processes involved here, we need to describe the work of the “WP29,” a working group of the United Nations on “Vehicle Construction.” It was officially formed in 1952, as a subdivision of the Inland Transport Committee of the UN. The first years of the working party saw it closely follow the evolution of non-binding automobile construction standards developed by scientists and engineers at organizations such as the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Their members then played a different role, as they had the ability to propose new technical rules that would later be adopted by member states. This led them to take care to balance competing constituencies and demands when setting

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automobile construction norms, between member states, data provided by SAE and ISO, and other non-governmental organizations. For the members of the WP29, the so-called “1958 agreement” significantly moved forward the process of harmonizing differing national vehicle regulations and standards by including the principle of “reciprocal recognition” of regulations (Bernardin & Grafos, 2008). Reciprocal recognition in this context meant that when a regulation originating in one country was adopted officially, after a vote by state representatives, the other countries had to recognize this regulation within their own borders. If France, for example, was to introduce a vehicle regulation on headlights and two-thirds of the WP contracting parties approved it, the regulation would subsequently be recognized by Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and other contracting parties (a legal term for states that have ratified and enforced the agreement). This legal functioning spiked car manufacturers’ interest in the WP 29, as it meant that they could play on non-tariff barriers either to open new markets worldwide, or to close them to competitors, with the help of their government representatives. It led to a discrete process of specialization of the debates within the working party, with experts from the industry developing and refining technical diagnosis to make the issue of automobile regulation their own domain. Occupational Health and the European Union: Ensuring Safety for Manufacturers and Employers In the case of occupational exposure limits (OELs), following the first international meetings organized by scientists to improve research on those themes, the aims became more closely linked to policies. During the 1960s and 1970s, the aim became to harmonize the work of several bodies of experts established at the national level. Through this period, fairly regular meetings of joint expert committees from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) led to the publication of a series of reports seeking to harmonize the rules for establishing OELs. Subsequently, in the 1980s, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), aspiring to harmonize markets, announced the creation of a common database to gather knowledge on existing toxic products and to avoid the multiplication of similar research in different member states (Zielhuis & Wibowo, 1989).3 After a period during which international organizations played a

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central role, from the 1970s onwards, the European Union had a lasting influence on European members states in this field. On 29 June 1978, the Council of the European Community adopted an Action Program on health and safety at work in which it was decided to encourage the use of limit values to regulate exposure to occupational toxic substances and to work toward their harmonization throughout Europe.4 This orientation of European policy was confirmed by the directive of 27 November 1980, which proposed to extend the use of OELs to all member states as one of the measures to manage occupational health.5 In 1990, as a follow-up to this first directive, the European Union set up an expert committee for setting OELs at the European Union level: the Scientific Committee on Occupational Exposure Limit Values (SCOEL). The establishment of this committee inside the European Commission is a reliable indicator of the transnationalization of expert assessment prior to the setting of limit values. The creation and progressive institutionalization of the SCOEL is a clear outcome of the dual mechanism of the scientification and transnationalization of policies regulating occupational exposure. It consequently became very difficult to propose other definitions of this issue, in particular definitions that would enable trade unions or other stakeholders once again to have a more upstream control over the production of these policies. The work of those expert committees to set OELs was a very particular exercise, which, while based on scientific data, led to somewhat delicate choices in terms of public health. Behind the complexity of the mechanisms for setting limit values (Scientific Committee on Occupational Exposure Limits (SCOEL), 2009), those decisions led to define levels of risk to which populations of workers would be exposed. They therefore incorporated a certain understanding of what was doable in terms of transforming working conditions and helped producing specific forms of social compromise as to what acceptable working conditions in a particular social context were (Corn, 1989; Markowitz & Rosner, 1995). The implications of maintaining their technical and scientific nature (which constitutes a central vector for depoliticizing this instrument) were however central. The production of the legitimacy of this instrument required that the actors taking part in the expert groups worked above all to produce values with a scientific meaning. They also had to do so in the form of collective work that had all the appearances of scientific work. If we put in abeyance what these groups produced (i.e., not new knowledge, but values that made it possible to manage situations

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of proven risk), their entire activity was close to the logic of scientific research: reading the literature, evaluating the work of other researchers, synthesizing work, and so on. The production of OELs could be sustained only insofar as belief in the scientific nature of the work carried out and in the scientific nature of these values was maintained. Hence, the experts participating in these various committees had to carry out work that met the criteria defining scientific work. The question of the role of scientists and experts and the definition of the process as a scientific one in the development of these values is therefore extremely important. The choice of a scientific and technical terrain for deciding the level of exposure that workers would have to undergo had important effects on the selection of actors able to influence this process. This change of terrain for social negotiations affected the extent to which the various actors were able to influence the course of the discussions, depending on the resources available to them. Trade unions had difficulty recruiting experts willing to work with them to help them understand the stakes in complex scientific debates. On the other hand, the strengthening of scientific and technical dimensions gave employers easier access from the production of knowledge (or ignorance) on regulated toxic substances, and to the arenas of expertise and bargaining on public regulations. Many studies have highlighted the ease with which industry was able to orient scientific research in the directions of interest to them (Markowitz & Rosner, 2002; Michaels, 2008; Proctor, 2011). Upstream, industrial actors had significant leeway in steering scientific research and expertise in a direction that benefited their interests, especially as research was increasingly funded by private capital (Krimsky, 2004). Industry’s powerful position was also reinforced by the time-related effects of the use of science and expertise, which significantly slowed down decision-making processes. The regulation of asbestos and its substitutes as refractory ceramic fibers in France reveals that there was always a 15–20-year lapse between the first demand for a limit value and its effective implementation, during which workers were still exposed to relatively high levels. This period allowed companies to secure a return on investments and to prepare reconversion strategies. The time at which a limit value comes into force is not an incidental element of this regulation, but a central dimension thereof: manufacturers take advantage of the years without regulation to anticipate future decisions, either by preparing companies for these decisions’ future application, or by planning product substitutions, or by shifting production sites to countries where regulation is less stringent. The opening of these

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time windows is thus greatly facilitated by the scientific and transnational dimensions of the decision-making processes. As in the field of traffic safety, industries’ position of strength is consolidated by the increasingly transnationalized modalities that have been developed in the national and European setting of OELs. Experts working for industries are heavily involved in the scientific community of industrial toxicology at European and global level and, as such, they have firsthand access to the most up-to-date scientific data at the international level. Far from posing a problem for them, the increasing transnationalization of experts’ work makes their task easier, because it brings the work of the committees closer to their usual working methods with toxicologists, while at the same time allowing them to hope for economies of scale in the long term by bringing national values and regulations closer together. This link between the transnational scale of work and the consideration of industrial interests is even stronger insofar as recent years have seen rapid mergers between major industrial groups on a European scale, giving way to increasingly internationalized groups. In both cases of occupational health and traffic safety, in sum, transnationalization processes have gone hand-in-hand with the rise of economic actors in decision-making processes. In the one hand, this relates to the willingness of these actors to better control globalized economic markets, in the other hand, their objective is to control the negative effects of regulation as much as possible.

Deny or Divide: The Two Faces of Concealment and Invisibilization of Social Problems There are some important similarities in the processes mentioned above, despite some slight differences between the two case studies. One of the most important points to emphasize is the scientific dimension of the debates which developed initially and was perpetuated and institutionalized over the long run in international arenas. It was not—and it still is not—devoid of political effects on the framing of the issues, as technicization modifies their definition and the political control of their treatment. In the two case studies, state officials had to deal with transnational actors wanting to address the problems in their own way, notably corporate actors and representatives of international organizations. This left them in a situation where they could not define any specific way to cope with

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the problem. Instead, they had to negotiate in arenas where the problems were predefined by others, giving them lesser capacities to propose solutions. More specifically, the transnationalization of public problems goes along with a technical specialization leading to a sort of concealment of the issues at stake. The cost of entry into the debates consequently becomes incredibly high for newcomers from non-governmental organizations or trade unions, for instance, which in turn precludes their participation in the definition of the problems to address. The transnationalization process thus leads to a marginalization of those actors who do not have the resources to access the technical debate. It follows that they are not allowed to discuss the very content of public policy anymore; they can only express concerns that a given program is well implemented or not, according to standards proposed by the international bureaucrats themselves. The internationalization of public problems thereby prevents outsiders from having their word in the shaping of solutions to the problems at hand. A process of depolitization of the issues can then occur, through the invisibilization of any possible alternative definition of the problem at national or local level. When Social Issues Disappear: Occupational Health as a One-Way Policy Such a process is especially clear in the case of occupational health, where the scientific and technical dimensions of the international debate played an important role in shaping debate on these issues and limiting them to specialists alone. From 1970 onwards, most developed countries adopted regulations incorporating lists of exposure limit values for occupational toxicants: this was the case in the United States in 1970, and then in the Federal Republic of Germany and several northern European countries, including the Netherlands and Sweden. The analysis of the generalization of this tool in France highlights the appropriation of modes of government that redefine the role of the state in relation to other stakeholders in this field. Since the 1990s, marked by the asbestos crisis and various public health crises, the French government has increasingly invested in occupational health issues. In particular, it has developed its own scientific expertise capabilities with the creation of health expertise agencies in various fields of public health. In the occupational health field, the agency that was to become the National Agency for Food, Environmental and

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Occupational Health Security (ANSES), began to take in charge occupational health issues in 2005. New European regulations have also been pushing the French state to intervene more visibly in the field of OELs, in particular by giving a more formal status to these values and by setting up a committee of experts responsible for their development within the ANSES. One might have expected that this commitment by the state to occupational health issues would have led it to play a much more important role in steering these policies. On the contrary, the fact that this re-engagement was concomitant with the redefinition of the instruments through which it was carried out led to a strong nuance of this statement. This evolution can be analyzed as the implementation of a new way of defining state intervention in the field of occupational risks, leading it to stay distant from scientific experts and industries. In fact, the logics of confinement linked to technicization and transnationalization contributed to the marginalization of some actors, especially trade union organizations as mentioned above, but also civil servants and government officials, who appear to have insufficient resources to become involved in these new forms of intervention and new negotiating arenas. Despite the creation of ANSES, the department in charge of those issues at the French Ministry of Labor remains insufficiently staffed and does not have the technical resources to monitor the regulation of all chemicals used by industry, and even less so to enforce their implementation. So much so, that in the implications of the international dissemination of the OEL tool is above all a transformation of the state’s methods of intervention in the field of occupational health. Like any instrument, limit values incorporate a certain conception not only of what occupational health is, but also and above all of what labor relations are, notably by individualizing the notion of exposure and thus making it something that affects each worker and no longer collectives. This issue is therefore not as directly related to labor negotiations between employers’ representatives and trade union organizations as it used to be. Occupational exposure to chemicals is an individual problem that must be managed and controlled by state-dependent control bodies or employers, responsible for applying the values defined by the expert committees. The deployment of OELs in France is therefore leading to a repositioning of the role of scientific expertise and knowledge, as well as to a strengthening of the weight of the most powerful economic actors (those with an international scope)

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in decision-making processes. This is particularly so insofar as their operating methods are in line with the highly internationalized functioning of expert committees, and also insofar as the regulations are rarely enforced. When Social Issues Reappear: Traffic Safety as a Multiple-Choices Policy The evolution of traffic safety issues at the international level has had a similar effect on state intervention. Here the rationalization of debates has not, however, resulted in the choice of a single tool to address the problem, or in any social aspects of the problem simply being denied or deleted from political agendas. In fact, at the UN a plurality of definitions co-exists for traffic safety, and it appears actually that not all of them are treated similarly by the experts. To make this clear, we need to go back to the functioning of the working groups dealing with traffic safety at the UN. It will help to reveal a social division of labor between experts that does not prevent victims’ associations, for instance, from having a say in the issue, but that allows its members to access only parts of the debate. This has not led to a complete disqualification of traffic safety as a social problem, but instead shows that any possible protest or criticism can be channeled and directed toward certain specific areas, so as not to interfere with industrial interests oriented toward vehicle regulation. The analysis sheds light on a trend in bureaucratic specialization, through which the problem of traffic safety became highly segmented at the UN. The members of the WP29 mentioned above are not the only ones at the UN dealing with car accidents; the experts of another working group, the “WP1,” also work on the topic, but from another perspective: the international harmonization of licensing and road signals. To them, traffic safety is a matter of prevention, not vehicle regulation, so they put the emphasis first and foremost on the need for every driver to drive safely. An analysis of their professional background helps to understand their viewpoint on the topic. For instance, the current French representative at the WP1, who is also its vice-president, was initially trained as a driver’s license examiner. He then worked for the French government as an official in charge of licensing policies at the national level. His U.S. counterpart was trained in educational sciences and psychology. He joined the federal government to deal with seat belt programs nationwide. Neither of them would consider traffic safety naturally as a matter of vehicle regulation, whereas their two colleagues from WP29, both trained as auto engineers, put the emphasis on automobile standards to prevent accidents.

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Within the WP1, members from victims’ organizations are not banned from the international debates on traffic safety. Their public representatives can even attend the meetings and have their word in the process of taking up best practices and disseminating them worldwide through communication campaigns. In sum, they can find an institutional space to express their concerns related to behavioral issues at the international level. Some experts listen carefully to their demands and act accordingly. They can even work on some practical translations of their demands into international conventions related to transportation policies worldwide. Most importantly, for victims’ organizations, their members are welcomed to assist the experts in the framing of public messages disseminated to prevent car accidents internationally. They can express concerns that speeding, for instance, or impaired driving, be given more visibility at the UN. As a consequence, their wishes are not “disqualified” by experts. It would be incorrect, indeed, to analyze the technicization of traffic safety in international organizations as a way of discrediting social concerns related to the automobile and driving in general. It is more accurate to say that victims’ organizations and their claims are “confined” in some specific arenas, such as the WP1, and isolated from other international arenas where traffic safety appears as a matter of technology and economics rather than social concerns. Paralleling the UN system of which it is a part, in the working party only governments— as represented by their technical experts—can vote on the regulations; other parties and non-governmental organizations have a “consultative” status. In other words, victims’ or consumers’ organizations are formally welcomed to take part in the debates, but they actually do not show up during the meetings in Geneva. When interviewed, their representatives emphasized that the debates at WP29 meetings are much too technical, not to say opaque. They also underlined the relatively scarce resources they have to attend meetings in international arenas, which leads them to focus most often on one—not two—working group at the UN. This translates into a subtle division of labor between corporate actors and victims’ organizations, where the former takes care of vehicle regulation, when the latter focuses on behavioral issues related to driving and road safety. It leaves the field of automobile standardization without any direct input from people outside of the industry. Vehicle regulation is thereby preserved from any unexpected criticism from outsiders. ∗ ∗ ∗

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Transnational problems are not a priori different from the political issues dealt with in national contexts, and only sociological fieldwork or archival research can help to track the particularities of transnational problems. It is therefore useful not to consider them only through the lens of their international dimensions. With this paper, we wanted to draw attention to the analytical importance of changing focus or multiplying points of view to study transnational problems. In fact, we consider it a methodological priority in order not to reify the process of transnationalization and not to forget about the all too mundane social and political processes in international arenas. That is why we wanted to show that some unexpected processes can be found behind what may look like a pure transnationalization process. These processes need to be characterized and analyzed carefully to understand what is (and what is not) specific to claims-making in international arenas. In both the cases studied, we were able to show that the transnationalization of issues was primarily a by-product of their initial scientific and technical framing. The actors involved relied extensively on internationalized communities of scientists and engineers to address the respective problems through technical collaboration that extended beyond national borders. After the Second World War, however, in connection with the institutionalization of international relations through some new organizations, these issues were gradually taken up in more formalized and official structures. Through this process, the weight of corporate actors increased drastically, along with the growing importance of the industrial sectors concerned (both automotive and chemical). Here again, the technoscientific dimension of the issues addressed facilitated the development of links with industrial logics of technical harmonization and commercial competition. Industrial actors played on their ability to fund scientific research in the sectors that concerned them to both reinforce their expert status and gain control of the transnationalization process, through the many technical committees, subcommittees, and working parties whose members are crucial in international regulation or deregulation. Finally, this specific construction of the two issues of traffic safety and occupational health has led to a particularly difficult positioning, not to say a functional withdrawal, of the state and some civil society stakeholders at the national level. In the case of occupational health, for instance, it appears increasingly difficult for unions and non-profit organizations to grasp issues defined in complex technical terms. In the case of traffic

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safety, their members seem to be confined to a limited number of arenas, where they can only access a limited framing of the issue. There is in sum an eviction de facto of actors like victims’ associations or unions from debates on structural issues such as vehicle equipment or work conditions. In turn, it reinforces a long-lasting trend for technicization of the issues to be dealt with at the international level, with experts only likely to have their word on those aspects of the problems. It leads to a lowering of the salience of these issues in the medias and political arenas. In other words, the internationalization of the problems occurs at the expense of an open debate on structural aspects of traffic safety or occupational health. It is even more true that the process of institutionalization, at both the international and national levels, relies on a practical obligation to defer to the choices made in specialized arenas, where the problems are dealt with on a technical routine basis. To be sure, the transnationalization of public problems is only one factor accelerating a process that actually originates in the strategies of technicization of some of the most powerful actors mobilized to promote or defend their own economic and political interest, in both cases of traffic safety and occupational health. Even if it seems too early to generalize this finding to international problems in general, we believe that the scientific and technical dimensions that characterize an increasing number of issues tend to reinforce the weight of industry in the decision-making process at the international level. Of course, this does not imply a blind assumption of the automatic nature of industry’s growing weight in all technoscientific issues, but it does invite us to pay particular attention to these dimensions and look for cases in which recourse to science and expertise could have different social and political implications.

Notes 1. We would like to thank the editors of the book and the participants in the preparatory workshops for their advices which allowed us to improve our text significantly. Emmanuel Henry also wants to thank the Center for Health and Wellbeing, part of the Princeton School of Public Policy and International Affairs at Princeton University for its generous hospitality which made it possible to work on the finalization of this text. 2. “Recommendations Submitted to the Economic and Social Council by the Transport and Communications Commission Concerning the Future Organization of Work on European Inland Transport Questions,” Economic

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Commission for Europe, Document E/CN.10/4 (Geneva: UNECE archives, 9 April 1947), 3–5. 3. OECD Council Decision-Recommendation on the Systematic Review of Existing Chemicals of 26 June 1987, C(87)90/FINAL. 4. Council Resolution of 29 June 1978 on an Action Program of the European Communities on safety and health at work, Official Journal of the European Communities, Official Journal of the European Union, C 165/1-13, 11 July 1978. 5. Council Directive 80/1107/EEC of 27 November 1980 on the protection of workers from the risks related to exposure to chemical, physical, and biological agents at work, Official Journal of the European Union, L 327/813, 3 December 1980.

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Devinck, J.-C. (2011). Les racines historiques de l’usage contrôlé de l’amiante (1947–1977). In A.-S. Bruno, E. Geerkens, N. Hatzfeld, & C. Omnes (Eds.), La santé au travail, entre savoirs et pouvoirs: 19e et 20e siècles, Pour une histoire du travail (pp. 243–254). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Freudenburg, W. (2000). Social constructions and social constrictions: Toward analyzing the social construction of ‘the naturalized’ as well as the natural. In G. Spaargaren, A. Mol & F. Buttel (Eds.), Environment and global modernity, sage studies in international sociology (pp. 103–120). London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Gardon, S. (2013). Les circulations de la circulation. Autonomisation transnationale d’une question automobile (des années 1920 aux années 1960). In M. Kaluszynski & R. Payre (Eds.), Savoirs de gouvernement. Circulation(s), traduction(s), réception(s) (pp. 23–37). Paris: Economica. Gardon, S. (2015). La construction et la circulation des savoirs dans des espaces nationaux et internationaux. Retour sur le rôle des enquêtes et des revues. In L. Hilaire-Pérez & P. Gonzalez-Bernaldo (Eds.), Les savoirs-mondes. Mobilités et circulation des savoirs depuis le Moyen-Age (pp. 209–218). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Gilbert, C. (2008). Quand l’acte de conduite se résume à bien se conduire. À propos du problème « sécurité routière ». Réseaux, 147, 21–48. Gilbert, C., & Henry, E. (2012). Defining social problems: Tensions between discreet compromise and publicity. Revue Française de Sociologie, 53(1), 31– 54. Gusfield, J. (1981). The culture of public problems: Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gusfield, J. (1989). Constructing the ownership of social problems: Fun and profit in the welfare State. Social Problems, 36(5), 431–441. Haas, P. M. (1992). Banning Chlorofluorocarbons: Epistemic Community Efforts to Protect Stratospheric Ozone. International Organization‚ 46(1), 187–224. Henry, E. (2015a). L’importation des valeurs limites d’exposition professionnelle en France: convergence transnationale ou redéfinition du rôle de l’État et des modes d’intervention publique?. In S. Boudia & E. Henry (Eds.), La mondialisation des risques. Une histoire politique et transnationale des risques sanitaires et environnementaux (pp. 181–196). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Henry, E. (2015b). La santé au travail: enjeu politique ou technoscientifique?. In A. Thebaud-Mony, P. Davezies, L. Voge, & S. Volkoff (Eds.), Les risques du travail. Pour ne pas perdre sa vie à la gagner (pp. 431–438). Paris: La Découverte. Henry, E. (2017). Ignorance scientifique et inaction publique. Les politiques de santé au travail. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

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Jasanoff, S. (2005). Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton‚ N. J: Princeton University Press. Krimsky, S. (2004). La recherche face aux intérêts privés. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond–Le Seuil. Laurens, S. (2015). Les courtiers du capitalisme. Milieux d’affaires et bureaucrates à Bruxelles. Marseille: Agone. Markowitz, G., & Rosner, D. (1995). The Limits of Thresholds: Silica and the Politics of Science, 1935 to 1990. American Journal of Public Health, 85(2), 253–62. Markowitz, G., & Rosner, D. (2002). Deceit and denial: The deadly politics of industrial pollution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Michaels, D. (2008). Doubt is their product: How industry’s assault on science threatens your health. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Murphy, M. (2006). Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty: Environmental politics, technoscience, and women workers. Durham: Duke University Press. Neveu, E. (2017). How do social problems and social conflicts travel across the borders? Journal of Conflict and Integration, 1(1), 8–38. Parey, C., & Sauterey, R. (2000). Evolution de la technique routière au XXe siècle. Revue Générale des Routes et des Aérodromes, 16–43. Paull, J. (1984). The origin and basis of threshold limit values. American Journal of Industrial Medecine, 5(3), 227–238. Payre, R. (2011). L’espace des circulations. Réseaux d’acteurs et fabrique transnationale des sciences administratives (années 1910–années 1950). In F. Audren, P. Laborier, J. Vogel, & P. Napoli (Eds.), Les sciences camérales. Activités pratiques et histoire des dispositifs publics (pp. 283–306). Paris: PUF. Permanent International Association for Road Congresses. (1909). Premier Congrès International de la Route. Compte rendu des Travaux du Congrès. Paris: PIARC. Proctor, R. (2011). Golden holocaust: Origins of the cigarette catastrophe and the case for abolition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rasmussen, A. (1995). L’Internationale scientifique 1890–1914. (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History). Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Robert, C. (2012). Expert Groups in the Building of European Public Policy. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 10(4), 425–38. Saunier, P.-Y. (2004). Circulations, connexions et espaces transnationaux. Genèses, 57, 110–126. Scientific Committee on Occupational Exposure Limits (SCOEL). (2009). Methodology for the derivation of occupational exposure limits: Key documentation (version 6). Luxembourg: European Commission. Sellers, C. (1997). Hazards of the Job: From industrial disease to environmental health science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Sellers, C. (2013). The cold war over the worker’s body: Cross-national clashes over maximum allowable concentrations in the post-world war II era. In S. Boudia & N. Jas (Eds.), Toxicants, health and regulation since 1945 (pp. 25– 45). London: Pickering and Chatto. Zielhuis, R. L., & Wibowo, A. A. (1989). Standard Setting in Occupational Health: “philosophical” Issues. American Journal of Public Health, 16(5), 569–98.

CHAPTER 10

From Global Problem Framing to Local Policy Implementation: Swiss Bureaucrats and the “Antibiotic Resistance” Issue Muriel Surdez

Since the late 1990s, the issue of antibiotic resistance has made its way onto the agendas of international organizations, especially the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), and the European Commission. The fact that bacteria are becoming ever more resistant to antibiotics is framed as an urgent and transnational problem, as the WHO emphasized on World Health Day 2011 with the slogan “No action today, no cure tomorrow.” While the process of publicizing the issue initially focused on information and recommendations, state bureaucrats have more recently been establishing national action plans according to the WHO (2014, 2015) and European Commission (2011) directives (Jensen, Beck Nielsen, & Fynbo, 2018). The problem is not only gaining importance through the action of international and national bodies (Fortané, 2015, 2016). It is also globalized in its own intricate way. According to a recent cross-sector

M. Surdez (B) Department of Social Sciences, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_10

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understanding of public health, antibiotic resistance should no longer be dealt with separately by human and veterinary medicine. This new frame is officially called the “one health” approach (Craddock & Hinchliffe, 2014). According to this approach, all action plans require cooperation between state bureaucrats in different administrative divisions, mainly health, food safety, agriculture, and environment. Given these developments,1 this chapter, based on a Swiss case study, examines the roles of national professional-bureaucrats in designing plans for implementing various measures against antibiotic resistance. It aims to discuss national reinterpretations of a global problem entrusted to national administrative bodies. This seems to us a valuable and underexplored line of research. The constructionist approach of social problems and the agenda-setting perspective have so far mainly focused on publicization and politicization, two crucial stages in the realization of a problem. There is no doubt that the initial framing impacts the later stages of the policy process. But, in considering the process by which issues become global, it appears equally relevant to grasp the scale effects between international and national arrangements. This chapter aims therefore to examine how national bureaucrats may, in practice, reshape agendas and problems primarily defined at the international level. While overall scholarly attention has emphasized the roles of political actors, interest groups, nonprofit organizations, and scientific experts, we would like to study how mid-level bureaucrats with different professional backgrounds manage a social problem, within the particular constraints and limits of the implementation stage. The bureaucrats with technical skills who write and work on implementation plans certainly have as much leeway as political actors.2

Reincorporating State Professional-Bureaucrats into the Making of Social Problems Although professional-bureaucrats have not been much studied, the fundamentals of the constructivist approach of social problems provide at least two reasons for doing so. First, the predominant career model, developed initially by Blumer (1971), mentioned that the state plays an important role, after the emergence of a problem, in mobilizing collective action and then in establishing and implementing an action plan. Second, in keeping with Gusfield’s concept of problem “owners” (1981), we would argue that administrative agents may own the

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definition of a problem and, perhaps more probably, the definition of its solutions. Gusfield highlighted the creation of an administrative body responsible for road safety, but did not go into its composition or mode of operation. When the constructivist approach attempted to go beyond national borders (see Chapter 1 in this volume), it either gave priority to analyzing how problems, and the balance between collective and individual responsibility, are framed within different national contexts (Saguy, Gruys & Gong, 2010, on obesity) or to “different patterns of institutional involvements in a problem” (Linders & Bogard, 2014, p. 148, on teenage pregnancy). A more recent line of research analyzes the representations, actions, and interests of bureaucrats (not just experts) employed by international bodies, as well as the strategies of bureaucrats representing their country on international committees (Boudia & Henry, 2015; Bernardin & Henry, in this volume). Interestingly, these bureaucrats may share characteristics and views that prevent them from simply defending national interests. Within the agenda-setting approach (to which my research perspective is less closely related), the agenda of the bureaucracy has attracted new research interest, building on Kingdon’s work on the streams that go into forming an agenda (Kingdon, 1984) and on the development of comparative studies. In the past ten years, the success of the “multiple streams analysis” has shifted academic attention to what happens in the following stages of policy processes in a great number of policy arenas (Howlett, McConnell, & Perl, 2015). Concurrently, the potential autonomy of administrative agendas from political ones has been reconsidered as part of the comparative study of national agendas (May, Workman, & Jones, 2008, p. 521). The transnationalization of agendas and problems highlights that bureaucrats may renew their expertise by dealing with transboundary, complex problems (Pump, 2011). The differences between centralized bureaucracies and bureaucratic structures in which “delegated authority dampens policy signals and leads to agenda stability” have also been investigated (May, Workman, & Jones, 2008, p. 521). Following the proponents of the constructivist school, this chapter aims to describe how mid-level professional-bureaucrats take on international demands to tackle the issue of antibiotic resistance. We argue that, as a part of the dissemination process (see Chapter 1 in this volume), they adapt the international framing of the problem to their own administrative context. In Switzerland, a national “Strategy on antibiotic resistance”

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(StAR) has been in place since 2015 (Federal Office of Public Health, 2015; Federal Office of Public Health, Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office, 2015). The professional-bureaucrats managing the issue in relation to animal health and food safety—the focus of our research— are veterinarians and chemical and food science engineers.3 The term “professional-bureaucrats” comes from the sociology of professions and refers to the fact that these individuals are, at the time of inquiry, working for the state administration, but that they are trained as members of a professional group and not as members of the state bureaucracy (Bezes et al., 2011).4 The sociology of social problems and the sociology of professions both emphasize the jurisdictional conflicts between different social groups or professional specializations. This chapter likewise highlights the “ownership” struggles within administrative units around two main challenges5 : the collaboration enjoined by the “one health” principle and the disputed responsibility for the problem. From this perspective, we will outline the types of measure the professional-bureaucrats consider appropriate, given the available resources, their previous professional habits, and their relationships within administrative settings. We argue that bureaucratic units compete around professional expertise and ask whether professionalbureaucrats who are able to impose their views of the problem increase their professional legitimacy by doing so. To develop these arguments, the first part examines the general challenges in constructing a plan against antibiotic resistance, given the balance of power and the division of labor between federal (national) and cantonal (regional) bureaucrats in the Swiss administration’s federal structure.6 This part highlights the tension between following international directives and taking into account state organizational specificities, a concern that is downplayed by describing the problem as scientifically manageable: Switzerland, along with the international community, is called on to work to prevent the development of new forms of resistance and to restrict the transmission and spread of resistance. Science shows that the problem of resistance can be tackled if the right tools are used. (Federal Office of Public Health, 2015, p. 14)

The second part of the contribution probes the struggles around ownership at cantonal level: each kind of professional-bureaucrat seeks to

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preserve their jurisdiction and skills, but does not want to be the exclusive actor in charge for fear of being blamed if the implementation fails (Neveu, 2015, p. 213). This is a particular dilemma for state veterinarians, who have to monitor veterinary practitioners on the ground. This chapter is based on a qualitative inquiry7 into major reforms in food safety administrative units in Switzerland over the past fifteen years. These structural changes have usually led to the merger of animal health and food safety units, as has also been the case at European Union level and in several European countries to different degrees (Janning, 2008). During the study, antibiotic resistance became an important responsibility for professional-bureaucrats in these units, so we took the opportunity, in terms of the sociology of social problems, to test whether they shared a common view of the problem. We conducted interviews with state professionals working in national and cantonal administrative structures. There were twenty six veterinarians, nine chemical engineers, six food safety engineers, seven laboratory technicians, and ten members of other administrative units (health, agriculture, and environment). We selected interviewees with different statuses (heads of departments, heads of units, heads of laboratories, employees, and retired staff) and from a variety of cantons (rural or urban, where reform was either ongoing or completed, and where the food-processing industry was present or not). The interviews were designed to address the career paths of these professionals, before and after entering public sector administration; their point of view on the restructuring of the food safety sector and its consequences on the division of tasks (for a similar methodology, see Jerolmack, 2013); their involvement in the national strategy against antibiotic resistance; and their commitment to this problem.8 In addition to interviews, we examined documents produced by the administrative units being researched.

How the Administrative Framing of a Global Problem Challenged Swiss Bureaucrats For the issue we are looking at the first stage for the administrative bodies framing the problem is to produce a “strategic plan.” If this seems obvious in the case of epidemics (Bourrier, Brender, & Burton-Jeangros, 2019; Torny, 2012), it has some noticeable consequences. Rather than refer

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to the general “antimicrobial resistance” described by scientists, the definition of the problem both at the international and the national level was reduced to antibiotic resistance in particular. The focus was placed on the uses of antibiotics, a topic that was much easier for governments, professionals, and consumers to understand. The WHO, which at first used the term “antimicrobial resistance,” later instituted “Antibiotic Awareness Week.”9 If the initial plans of the WHO (2014, 2015), the European Commission (2011), and Switzerland (Federal Office of Public Health, 2015) subdivided the problem into similar fields of activity (monitoring; appropriate use of antibiotics; information and training; and research, innovation, and development), they all focused on antibiotics and primarily on their “appropriate” rather than their “reduced” use. Antimicrobial resistance was only a priority for monitoring and research (World Organization for Animal Health, 2016).10 These plans feature another way of globalizing the issue at administrative level: comparisons and rankings, which combine elements of international competition and national exhortation. Documents presenting the necessity of the plans generally describe the current state of resistances “worldwide,” compare resistance rates between countries, and often show the evolution of antibiotic consumption over time.11 The Swiss Strategy on Antibiotic Resistance (2015) shows Switzerland as being “average” for antibiotic use in human medicine: it “looks good” compared to France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and countries in Eastern or Southern Europe, but is “behind” Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. In veterinary medicine, Switzerland is “doing well,” but not as well as Nordic countries. The report ends with a warning: much remains to be done in order to implement a “global strategy” linking animal and human health, since previous studies and monitoring efforts were carried out separately. Here is evidence of the new framing of the issue, stressing the importance of a “one health” approach. Beneath the Surface of National Plans International and national plans appear relatively homogeneous at this so-called “strategy level,” but a closer look reveals variations in priorities and timing.12 For instance, the European Commission, WHO, and Swiss plans all mention prevention, but place different emphases on vaccination, containment, and biosecurity. The European and Swiss plans both mention the goal of coordinated action, but the WHO plan does not

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(despite the WHO generally advocating for it). National plans also integrated the “one health” approach earlier or later, depending on whether countries were just beginning to react to the problem (Switzerland), or already had separate plans for human and animal health that proved harder to combine (France). And if the national plan came later (2018) in Denmark, it was not because the issue could not be tackled, but because it was already treated in a routine way (Linders & Bogard, 2014).13 Moreover, a range of both scientific and organizational specificities became visible once the problem entered the administrative agenda. Let us take the “monitoring of antimicrobial resistance” as an example (see also Fortané, 2016, for the French case). In Switzerland, laboratories in several Swiss universities pool data to monitor pathogens in patient samples received from hospitals. Although the Swiss Strategy on Antibiotic Resistance increased their funding, they only monitor the more common cases of antibiotic resistance. Monitoring is largely absent in private medicine. In veterinary medicine, the presence of resistant bacterias was carefully monitored in slaughterhouses, but less well monitored at national level compared to human medicine. A national bureaucrat, specialized in human medicine and responsible for the Swiss national strategy, discovered the difficulty of monitoring animal pathogens: On the other hand, the veterinarians have a lot more trouble carrying out real monitoring of animal pathogens. Because… it costs money [smile]. It costs the farmer money, and it’s simpler and cheaper for the farmer to pay for the antibiotic, without analyses, without detailed diagnosis of antibiotic resistance. That’s because they are in a very different situation from that of human medicine. (Physician1, head of a federal unit, Bern, November 2, 2015)

Combining human and veterinary medicine is scientifically and financially difficult, despite the connections between the two domains. Antibiotic Resistance Reveals the Balance of Power Between Federal and Cantonal Administrative Units Aiming to understand how the problem is reappraised in different national contexts, we argue that concrete measures result from the hierarchy, whether stable or changing, of the administrative structures involved. In Switzerland, the animal health and food safety administrative

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units at federal (i.e., national) level long lacked power over their decentralized administrative counterparts in cantons. Cantonal professionalbureaucrats used to have considerable leeway in deciding how to tackle an animal disease or penalize a fraud in food safety. A 2012 law relating to epidemics gave the federal administrative units a broader scope for action, enhancing their decisional role and the enforcement role of cantonal administration. Consequently, cantonal bureaucrats had to fulfill new tasks with no additional funding and were more closely overseen by federal bureaucrats. The law identifies antibiotic resistance as needing more coordinated efforts between the national and cantonal scales. Professional-bureaucrats working in the federal units felt deeply committed to establishing the global strategy against antibiotic resistance within their national borders. They renewed their sphere of competence, especially in project management, by implementing international requirements and being in charge of the coordination between the various federal and cantonal units (rather than by realizing concrete measures). The lead for coordinating the project was the unit for infectious diseases in human medicine (part of the Federal Office of Public Health within the Federal Department of Home Affairs), which benefited from this opportunity to increase its resources and visibility, as one official told us: Ok, it’s a very important field of activity for which we received new and important financial support. We initiated the project, the project of a common strategy with the other Offices. When this will be completed, we will lead the implementation of the strategy. (Physician1, head of a federal unit, Bern, November 2, 2015)

Because this unit was in competition for staff and other resources with units that were more oriented toward public health campaigns, its members were all the more inclined to promote a “global” strategy. A project manager in charge of the antibiotic resistance plan emphasized that the first plans elaborated by the WHO did not attract enough attention because they were too sector-oriented: “I think the reason why the problem became an important issue only later is that it initially reflected an excessively sector-based point of view, disease by disease. The mindset is now different” (Biologist, federal unit, Bern, May 2, 2016). Interestingly, this coordinating unit did not design the national plan with the goal of completely integrating human and veterinary medicine, the argument being that the plan would be more efficient if each sector

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took responsibility for its own domain of expertise. This reinterpretation of the “one health” framing of the problem resulted from the federal administration’s difficulty in making rapid use of its new powers in health matters. A small pre-existing federal task force, created in response to mad cow disease, did not have the legitimacy to take on the task of designing the Swiss Strategy on Antibiotic Resistance, with cantonal bureaucrats still regarding themselves as the competent authority for the proper application of federal and cantonal norms: “The opposite side, i.e., the management authorities, often did not agree to be audited” (Food safety eng.5, federal unit, Bern, February 19, 2016). At the same time, although the various federal offices involved in the strategy held regular meetings together, their staff seemed to have internalized their pre-existing job descriptions. An agronomist in the Office for agriculture explained that: “It is mostly the Veterinary and Food Safety Office which is in charge of all issues related to animal health […] Here we do practical things” (Agricultural eng.1, Office for Agriculture, Bern, July 12, 2018).14 To sum up, even though the national plan against antibiotic resistance coincided with increased powers for federal professional-bureaucrats, it did not follow that the “one health” framing of the problem would prevail. Consequently, the staff of the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office retained ownership of how to manage the problem on the animal health side. They considered that antibiotic resistance fundamentally transformed the veterinary profession, as well as their own role. They based the management of the issue on two pillars: on the one hand, reforming the profession to be more preventive than curative, and on the other, increasing their supervision of antibiotic use as the best way to reduce it. In Switzerland, as in various other European countries, veterinary practitioners are licensed to sell antibiotics. The head of the Food Safety and Veterinary Office would have liked to encourage a change of habit by giving more value to the practice of counseling than to antibiotic prescription and sale15 : “I must be able to earn my money with my counselling function, instead of selling drugs to you” (Vet7, federal unit, Bern, February 2, 2016). The federal administration lacks the financial resources to bring about this major shift in the symbolic and material economy of the veterinary profession. To date, the Swiss Strategy on Antibiotic Resistance has not invested in this goal, not least because the veterinary profession considers

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itself to be a liberal one, independent of state subsidies. At this stage of the implementation process, the deeply entrenched relationship between the state apparatus and professional bodies prevents a rapid redefinition of the problem in favor of a preventive mode of regulation. This being the case, the professional-bureaucrats have prioritized monitoring and checks on the distribution of antibiotics. For this, federal bureaucrats need to rely on the cantonal bureaucrats who work with veterinarian practitioners to apply the national plan on the ground. To sum up, in their attempt to change the regulation model, national bureaucrats cannot simply be described as powerless or in opposition to those they have to supervise. They are part of the established professional regulation.

Inter-Professional Collaboration at Cantonal Level: Divergent Priorities and Responsibilities The second part of this chapter looks in more detail at the cantonal level, where bureaucrats are more closely confronted with tighter control on antibiotics. It also pays attention to the configuration of professionalbureaucrats within the now merged veterinary and food safety units. While the national plan mentioned the joint effort required from human health and animal health professionals, as well as from the whole range of professionals involved in the food chain, the interviews we conducted revealed a different picture. In the food safety sector, veterinarians on the one side, and chemical and food science engineers on the other did not feel equally involved or responsible. The main reasons for this were ingrained professional habits and divergent perspectives on the problem’s scope. Cantonal Veterinarians: Involved, but Cautious For cantonal veterinarians, antibiotic resistance is a very challenging turning point: they might well have to reinforce their supervision of veterinarians in private practice and farmers with whom they had long shared the belief that antibiotics were key to their professional practice, for both health and economic reasons. These cantonal bureaucrats collectively considered the problem to be a very complex one requiring complex solutions. Change was clearly necessary, but not easy.16 Controlling the use of antibiotics among other veterinary drugs was already one of their tasks, not least because of the importance of avoiding

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these drugs ending up in food products. This role has been reinforced, first in 2004 with a reform of the veterinary drug act, and again a decade later as part of the Swiss Strategy on Antibiotic Resistance. From a sociology of professions perspective, these bureaucrats might well have been pleased to increase of their regulative power over the veterinary profession. However, as professional-bureaucrats on the front line, they recognized the need for control, but also stressed that it was necessary to educate veterinary practitioners, which takes time: Veterinary practitioners should be looked at, because right now, many antibiotics are still used, sometimes even without knowing the diagnosis, either for pets or in livestock farming. […] So, in this matter, many professional habits have to be changed, and it won’t be easy. (Vet9, cantonal laboratory unit manager, April 5, 2016)

Like other professionals dealing with implementation, cantonal veterinarians are very sensitive to the balance between coercive and supporting tools. The control of antibiotics has not become as effective as planned, due to the limits of administrative action. The frequency of visits to vet practices has already been reduced for lack of resources. Moreover, the controls entailed a strong procedural aspect, as noted by a state veterinarian specialized in this matter: We might be aware of the fact that one practitioner is selling too many antibiotics, but if he can justify it according to his practice… For example, he might sell medicated concentrates, but he is able to give us the prescriptions and all the official documents filled out… What do you want us to find out there? We can’t influence his way of working, his professional choices. (Retiredvet1, former head of a cantonal office, March, 14, 2016)

Despite these obstacles, the transnationalization of the antibiotic resistance issue and the Swiss Strategy on antibiotic resistance provide these professional-bureaucrats with more arguments for taking action, by comparing antibiotic use in different countries. Prepared since a couple of years, a new tool is now being implemented: this is a national compulsory computer-based monitoring system for antibiotic prescriptions in which each vet has to assess itself the amount and kind of antibiotic he gives to each of his clients. Cantonal veterinarians agreed to adopt this new tool in order to maintain the veterinary profession’s ownership of the redefinition of “best practices” regarding antibiotics. It is worth noting that national

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and cantonal professional-bureaucrats worked to convince the Organization of Swiss Veterinarians to get involved rather than being circumvented or discredited.17 At the same time, cantonal veterinarians are prone to looking for justifications for antibiotic (mis)use to avoid blaming veterinarians in the field. One reason frequently given by interviewees, especially those in the animal welfare sector, is the systemic conditions in which veterinarians and farmers work: It’s quite easy to not give any antibiotics, but afterwards you will likely face a problem of animal welfare. And things here are really stemming from structural conditions, from the whole market conditions. For example, there was a pilot project for meat producers to try to fatten calves on a smaller scale. There were no more than thirty animals. And what did producers do? They still put them into a big hangar (…). So, the pathogenic agents were there. (Vet5, head of a cantonal office, January 15, 2015)

They also strategically used the “one health” frame of antibiotic resistance to apportion at least as much responsibility to human physicians as to veterinarians for the current state of affairs, as stated by a vet who took this line of defense: “Personally, I think the problem concerns mainly human medicine. Veterinarians have been talking about it for years, but in human medicine, it hasn’t been the subject of much debate” (Vet18, manager of an animal health unit, France). As part of their share of the division of labor and responsibilities in managing the problem, state veterinarians are thus expected to maintain a balance between recommendations on the one hand, and constraint and coercion on the other. Acknowledging the difficulty of reducing the amount of antibiotics, they are keen to take on the role of conduits for disseminating updated rules on the “appropriate use of antibiotics,” such as the therapeutic guide prepared at federal level in 2018 which describes when antibiotics should be used rather than mentioning when they should be avoided. How Do Chemical Engineers Distance Themselves from the Problem? Working in the same units as the veterinarians at federal level and in three of the four cantons that we investigated, the chemical engineers that we

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interviewed distance themselves from the problem despite being included in the “one health” plan. Far from taking it for granted that they objectively have less responsibility, we show how they frame the problem so as not to be a significant part of its ownership. While the global and international framing of antibiotic resistance made it difficult for them to deny the problem’s existence, they made two claims: that the fight against antibiotic resistance should not take place at the expense of other issues in food safety and that antibiotic resistance is a matter of animal health rather than food safety. From their point of view, as professionals trained in laboratory work and chemical analysis, many substances deserve attention and analysis, and it is essential to continue to work on all of them: As chemical engineers active at a cantonal level, it’s really better to stand back… We’re at the frontline concerning pesticides, so everyone has to do their part of the job, everyone should defend their own territory, that’s the way it should go […] So, compared to other professionals, we stand back, we can measure and quantify, we have the right equipment. (Chem. eng.3, head of a cantonal unit, March, 14, 2016)

The interviewees mentioned pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) in fish, genetically modified organisms, and nanoparticles, each substance either a classic residue to be monitored or a potential risk calling for further investigations. They counterbalanced antibiotic resistance with other global human health problems, such as contamination, in order to preserve their existing work agenda. More specifically, they were not willing to devote their technical skills to conduct more antimicrobial susceptibility testing, the most common method for adjusting antibiotic treatments to the exact bacteria in sick animals (Fortané, 2015). They deemed this to be a kind of “dirty” and uncertain work, because readymade test-kits from big firms existed already and because it had not been clarified who would pay for it. For these chemical engineers, antibiotic resistance is firmly related to the medicinal treatment of animals and humans, and health issues are distinct from food safety: As the authority controlling food, we’re staying very, very far back. We have practically no influence over the resistance to antibiotics. The problem lies further up the chain, where antibiotics are used… and it’s a fact that too

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many antibiotics are being used in veterinary medicine. It is in this field that things have to be tackled…. I mean, for this problem our interventions are pretty limited, aren’t they? (Chem. eng.6, head of a cantonal office, September, 30, 2016)

Within this framing, our interviewees identified the main source of the problem to be the insufficiently controlled distribution of antibiotics. They admitted that these misuses have consequences for food safety and the environment, but did not change the way that they measured antibiotic residues in food products. They did not contemplate stricter checks on whether norms were being respected or whether these norms were even suitable, thinking that “the federal state should be responsible for that, for risk assessment, shouldn’t it?” (Retiredchem. eng.1, former head of a cantonal unit, June 29, 2016).18 In addition to framing antibiotic resistance as a curative and preventive preoccupation, the chemical engineers considered it best combated not at the global but at the local level. Since they considered the growing international movement of food products (including vegetables and fruits), animals, and humans to be an unavoidable phenomenon, they argued that action should be taken only after the resistance has been identified, for example in the case of a particular type of food causing a disease. Here is an additional form of the relocation of a transnational problem. In this section, we have described some reasons why not all professional-bureaucrats became deeply involved in the “fight” against antibiotic resistance, even though the Swiss national plan underlines the need for close cooperation between all administrative stakeholders. We note the discrepancy between the most salient and urgent aspects of the problem as defined by international organizations and the possible instruments for managing it at national level.

Conclusion These findings encourage further examination of the role of mid-level professional-bureaucrats in reformulating a problem that has been established on the international agenda. The process of globalization does not cease once a problem is established on the agenda of international institutions such as the WHO, quite the contrary. A game of scale changes is set in motion, in which the issue’s global framing is adapted to

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particular national administrative structures and inter-professional configurations. It might seem that the definition of antibiotic resistance as a problem and the possible courses of action have already been established when national and regional professional-bureaucrats take on the issue. However, professional-bureaucrats have a role to play in reframing and disseminating the problem, firstly because neither international nor European institutions have the power to set binding deadlines or measures (although they apply increasing pressure through state visits) and secondly because plans and measures have more domestic legitimacy when national stakeholders are convinced that they best fit their needs and possibilities. It is worth noting the complexity of the professional-bureaucrats’ position and the kind of “ownership” that they have over the problem. They may be able to select regulative tools, but they are also embedded in broader relationships that shape how they conceive of possible solutions. In public policy analysis, they would be described as part of a public policy community that shares a common ownership over a policy (sub)field. This process in the globalization of problems raises questions for further study of national bureaucrats’ work. Do these bureaucrats lose professional authority and autonomy, insofar as “professional autonomy” is defined by the sociology of professions as the self-definition of goals? The elaboration of plans or guidelines compatible with international recommendations and standards likely involves standardizing assessment tasks. But, as antibiotic resistance gains prominence on international and national policy agendas, certain professional-bureaucrats increase their expertise and possibly also their visibility in the eyes of national political actors who are usually alert to more “visible” issues, such as healthcare costs. In order to grasp sociologically the role of these bureaucrats, a future line of research consists in comparing their characteristics (professional origins and training; private/public career; national/international career; recruitment after a national competitive examination as in France or England; and coexistence in the same unit with nonspecialized bureaucrats or not), as well as their relationships with different stakeholders in different national contexts (Alam, 2007). This should help to explain variations in the implementation process. This chapter has set out some significant particularities of the Swiss administration. A further goal would be to widen this approach to bureaucrats working in countries where international recommendations were adapted differently, for example, in

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Denmark where an agreement between national bureaucrats, the veterinary profession, farmers’ unions, and the food-processing industry on banning the sale of antibiotics in return for paid livestock supervision and preventive treatments predated international plans. It will be interesting to examine the action and mobilization capacities of mid-level bureaucrats in different countries. The tools they prioritized depended on their alliances with non-state professional organizations and how these organizations were organized (are they unifying the interests of several professions or on a single one?). If the veterinary profession is a privileged partner with comparable prestige and power in both Switzerland and Denmark, its structure is not completely similar in terms of the size and distribution of practices throughout the territory. Whether the approach is comparative or focused on a single national configuration, it intends to simultaneously examine how the problem is defined and by which professionals, rather than to seek general factors (cultural or economic ones for example) that would explain the national definitions of the problem. In line with this approach, we show that the international definition of antibiotic resistance as a problem emphasized the “one health” dimension, whereas the implementation process in a national setting allowed the division between human health and animal health to reappear. This demonstrates that the predominant framing at one stage (agenda-setting) is not automatically reproduced in later stages when specialized mid-level bureaucrats become involved. This also proves the relevance of complementing the social problem perspective with questions more familiar to agenda and policy studies, such as the transformation of bureaucratic agendas, or the transfer of policy tools at the implementation stages, which should in turn have some effect on the global framing of the globalized issue.

Notes 1. Antibiotic resistanceas a problem illustrates well that globalization is a process since national and international bodies have been aware of the potential risk of antibiotic use since the 1950s (Podolsky et al., 2015, pp. 27–32). 2. In Switzerland, the head of the Federal Department of Home Affairs (which included the Federal Office of Public Health and the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office) publicly launched the national plan against antibiotic resistance in 2015.

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3. Chemical and food engineers are in charge of monitoring the safety of all food products (thus intersecting with veterinarians), as well as the standards of hygiene of the businesses producing them, from food processing firms to restaurants. Food engineers usually carry out inspections and collect samples in the field, which are then analyzed by chemical engineers in laboratories. In other countries, professionals with different specializations (biology) or with a more general and basic training may fulfill these functions, which may explain divergences in national plans. 4. State veterinarians are in charge of animal health problems, such as outbreaks of animal diseases. They also ensure that products of animal origin, mainly meat and milk, comply with regulations. Those we interviewed had originally trained as generalist veterinarians. This was also true for the younger state veterinarians from our sample who were about 35, since an “animal public health” specialization was only fairly recently introduced in the two Swiss veterinarian faculties. Antibiotic resistance was therefore not a topic they were familiar with. Those who began their career in private practice told us they did not question the professional habits of practice owners. Of those who started their career in research, only two interviewees dealt with this topic. 5. This perspective is also close to public policy analyses that pay attention to the internal hierarchy in state structures, as well as to the professional and social characteristics of bureaucrats. 6. From a sociological perspective, this tension is heightened in federal states, but any implementation process has to adapt and reorient to reach local actors (see Conclusion). 7. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2015 to 2017 as project number 10001A_159308. 8. We used SPSS software to analyze the career paths of the professionalbureaucrats. Their discursive explanations were analyzed using Atlas.ti, for instance the list of items associated with “antibioresistance.” 9. https://www.who.int/news-room/campaigns/world-antibiotic-awaren ess-week, last consulted in March 2020. 10. The Swiss National Science Foundation has been funding research on antimicrobial resistance since 2016, in parallel to the strategic national action plan against antibiotic resistance. 11. Several interviewees stated that they selected information from data available on the Internet, whilst direct contact with international intermediaries seemed less prevalent. 12. For an analysis of cultural patterns in national campaigns relating to antibiotic prescriptions, see Kragh and Strudsholm (2018). 13. The arrangements between state actors, veterinarians, and the national organization representing producers and the food-processing industry led to an early control of antibiotics distribution (Jensen et al., 2018).

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14. The report “Environmental Goals for Swiss Agriculture” (Federal Office for the Environment & Federal Office for Agriculture, 2016) did not mention antibiotic resistance as a priority, but as a problem linked with water treatment and soil protection. 15. A stricter alternative, adopted in Denmark for example, is to ban practitioners who prescribe antibiotics from selling them too. 16. These were the common features brought out by items analysis. For the differences in cantonal administrative settings, notably between vets who endorse the managerial control function and vets who present themselves as being close to grassroots professionals, see Surdez Piquerez, and Debons (2018, 2020). Vets working in microbiology laboratories are at a greater remove from the problem than their colleagues in the animal health sector or who check animal products. These attitudes are also related to the social origins of the public veterinarians: out of the twenty five in our sample, five were the children of farmers and 12 were the grandchildren of farmers. Those with a family history of farming may be more reluctant to simply blame farmers. 17. The Swiss Farmers’ Union is not deeply involved in designing the measures in the Swiss Strategy on Antibiotic Resistance, although they are still very active in shaping agricultural policy. 18. The only exception that we found was a research project to more systematically test for antibiotic residues in milk.

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Linders, A., & Bogard, C. J. (2014). Teenage pregnancy as a social problem: A comparison of Sweden and the United States. In A. Cherry & M. Dillon (Eds.), International handbook of adolescent pregnancy (pp. 147–156). Boston: Springer. May, P. J., Workman, S., & Jones, B. D. (2008). Organizing attention: Responses of the bureaucracy to agenda disruption. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(4), 517–541. Neveu, E. (2015). Sociologie politique des problèmes publics. Paris: Armand Colin. Podolsky, S. H., Bud, R., Gradmann, C., Hobaek, B., Kirchhelle, C., Mitvedt, T., et al. (2015). History teaches us that confronting antibiotic resistance requires stronger global collective action. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 43(2), 27–32. Pump, B. (2011). Beyond metaphors: New research on agendas in the policy process. Policy Studies Journal, 39(1), 1–12. Saguy, A., Gruys, K., & Gong, S. (2010). Social problem construction and national context: News reporting on “overweight” and “obesity” in the United States and France. Social Problems, 57 (4), 587–610. Surdez, M., Piquerez, L., & Debons, J. (2018). «De la fourche à la fourchette» : une recomposition des territoires d’activité chez les professionnels suisses du contrôle sanitaire des aliments?. SociologieS. http://journals.openedition.org/ sociologies/9013. Surdez, M., Piquerez, L., & Debons, J. (2020). Les professionnels du contrôle sanitaire des aliments face à l’antibiorésistance. Un problème susceptible de modifier leurs conceptions et leur travail?. In E. Fouilleux & L. Michel (Eds.), Quand l’alimentation se fait politique(s) (pp. 161–175). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Torny, D. (2012). De la gestion des risques à la production de la sécurité. L’exemple de la préparation à la pandémie grippale. Réseaux, 171(1), 45–66. World Health Organization. (2014). Antimicrobial resistance: Global report on surveillance. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/112642. World Health Organization. (2015). Global action plan on antimicrobial resistance. https://www.who.int/antimicrobial-resistance/global-actionplan/en/. World Organization for Animal Health. (2016). The OIE strategy on antimicrobial resistance and the prudent use of antimicrobials. www.oie.int/amrstr ategy.

CHAPTER 11

When International Indicators Disrupt Party Competition: How Standardized School Tests and Preferences Affect Parties’ Issue Emphasis Thomas Artmann Kristensen

Numbers pervade politics. Public organizations publish and use indicators such as hospital waiting lists and standardized school tests to evaluate the quality of public services (Moynihan, 2008). In an increasingly globalized world, international organizations such as the OECD, the WTO, and the World Bank publish more and more indicators that provide national politicians with information about domestic policy problems (Davis, Fisher, Kingsbury, & Merry, 2012; Kelley & Simmons, 2015). By facilitating comparisons across countries these international indicators contribute to the globalization of otherwise mostly national problems on policy issues ranging from business and education to human rights (Bandura, 2008; Neveu, 2017). The question remains how political parties respond to and utilize cross-national numbers. Studying party competition is imperative to understanding the consequences of international indicators. Parties are

T. A. Kristensen (B) Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_11

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some of the main actors in representative democracies that define the political agenda and drive the policy process through the parliamentary system (Dalton, Farrell, & McAllister, 2011). By devoting attention to, ignoring, or criticizing international indicators, parties are central claim-makers that “translate” international indicators into policy problems that demand political action. However, one of the dominant theoretical perspectives on party competition, issue competition, which argues that parties compete by drawing attention to favorable issues and ignore issues favoring their opponents, has shown little interest in investigating how international indicators affect party behavior (Budge & Farlie, 1983; Carmines, 1991; Petrocik, 1996). This chapter investigates how parties respond when a new international indicator redefines issue competition by changing which parties hold an advantage from emphasizing an issue. International indicators are powerful constructs that exert a strong influence on the construction of policy problems (Neveu, 2017). They may change the dominant portrayal of an issue by highlighting problems that were not apparent before and by bringing attention to new policy solutions that are not embraced by parties who have otherwise dominated an issue in terms of issue emphasis but by their opponents. We know little about how parties behave, when this happens. How do they struggle over the definition of the indicator as a policy problem? Do the parties with a strong issue focus ignore the new indicator or go on the offensive by increasing attention to the issue in an attempt to defend their pet issue? Do the parties who are suddenly provided with evidence in support of its views, take advantage of this opportunity despite it not being their first choice of issue? To answer these questions, the chapter utilizes the OECD’s PISA investigation, which has assessed the skills of 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science every third year since 2000 across most OECD countries. PISA provides an excellent case because it is one of the largest international studies on student achievement that allows for comparable scoring and benchmarking across countries. Moreover, PISA can largely be seen as an exogenous shock to party competition as it is carried out independently of national party politics, which precludes parties from any say in how the PISA scores are calculated. Most importantly, PISA is a public policy tool that focuses on how society benefits economically from education (Bieber & Martens, 2011). This economic rationale has challenged socio-culturally liberal parties such as the Danish Social Liberals, the People’s Party in Sweden, and the Dutch D66. These parties

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normally prioritize education policy the most but see the development of self-emancipation and civic skills as the most important outputs of education. Drawing on time-series data that contains detailed coding of party attention to primary and secondary education in election manifestos across six Western European countries, the chapter makes three novel contributions to the literature. First, it shows that exogenous information from an international indicator affects the issue emphasis of political parties. This finding contrasts with the dominant assumption within the issue competition literature that parties primarily care about emphasizing their preferred issues but are ignorant of information about the severity of problems (Budge & Farlie, 1983; Simon, 2002). Second, for the literature on international indicators (Davis et al., 2012; Kelley & Simmons, 2015; Doshi, Kelley, & Simmons, 2019), the chapter provides important insights on the role that party actors play in the construction of international indicators as national policy problems. Parties are strategic actors who respond to indicators based on their political preferences. When PISA brings forward problematic information that depicts education in ways disfavored by socioculturally liberal parties with a strong issue focus, these parties fight back and increase their issue emphasis in an attempt to denounce PISA and protect their issue dominance. Party competition dynamics thus interfere in the responsiveness to international indicators, which suggests that the effects of international indicators depends on how they feed into national party competition. Third, the chapter contributes to the literature on PISA (Grek, 2009; Martens & Niemann, 2013) by providing the first quantitative study that demonstrates systematic political consequences of the PISA. Previous research on PISA has mostly been based on case studies or interviews and has focused on why countries respond differently (similar) to similar (different) results, suggesting little or no relationship between the PISA scores and countries’ responses (Knodel, Martens, & Niemann, 2013; Pons, 2012). These studies have focused on national particularities such as differences in educations systems to account for varying responses, which means that they provide very little general knowledge about the impact of PISA. In contrast, this chapter highlights that the increased globalization of education problems, partly driven by PISA, has led to important similarities in how political actors across countries have responded to PISA.

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Indicators and Party Competition According to the issue competition literature, parties struggle over which issues should be salient on the political agenda—immigration, crime, or climate policy? Issue competition scholars expect that parties emphasize issues that benefit them, either because they care about them ideologically (Budge & Farlie, 1983) or because voters view them as competent at handling issue-related problems (Petrocik, 1996). By doing so, they try to force their opponents to take up issues that they would otherwise ignore and have them dominate the party-political agenda. The limitation of these studies is that they assume that parties are unconstrained to selectively emphasize preferred issues without having to consider information about problems for instance from indicators. Yet, the world is full of quantitative information about problems that parties are expected to address (Baumgartner, Jones, & Wilkerson, 2011). More and more of these numbers come from international organizations that publish indicators across most policy areas ranging from the “Ease of Doing Business Index” to the “Corruption Perception Index” (Bandura, 2008). It is difficult to imagine that parties can ignore international indicators. Indicators have recently been defined as “a named collection of rank-ordered data that purports to represent the past or projected performance of different units” (Davis et al., 2012, p. 6). They reduce complex societal problems often to a single measure that appears objective and is accessible to most, which make them powerful agenda-setting tools. Obviously, the link between indicators and problems is far from simple as political actors frequently clash over the construction and interpretation of indicators (Mügge, 2016). Yet, once problems get measured, those numbers tend to depoliticize otherwise subjective problems, which means that they have important consequences to the attention of political actors (Kingdon, 1984; Stone, 1988). Indicators from international organizations are especially likely to exert a strong pressure on parties to respond (Kelley & Simmons, 2015). Most of this power come from their comparative dimension. International indicators work as monitoring devices that check and observe the quality of national policies over time and place. They enhance comparability of problems across countries and enable policy-makers and people to rate and rank them. This attribution of relative positions fosters a strong air of competition (Martens & Niemann, 2013). If a country is outperformed

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by similar countries with which there is a historical competition, then the relative disadvantage constitutes a problem that parties have to explain in domestic politics (Kingdon, 1984). The media is likely to be an important driver of this, because poor results on international indicators are likely to generate media coverage (Dixon et al., 2013). Moreover, negative results are likely to mobilize voters and domestic political actors such as interest groups, thinks tanks, and NGOs who in turn press decision-makers with demands for action. If such demands are backed by international reliable data published by an international organization that are seen as impartial and credible, the cost of ignoring them can be high. A few recent studies within the issue competition literature have shown that parties adjust their issue emphasis to information about problems (Green-Pedersen & Jensen, 2019; Pardos-Prado & Sagarzazu, 2019), especially if a country’s performance is worsening in comparison to similar countries (Traber, Schoonvelde, & Schumacher, 2019). However, Tavits and Potter (2015) show that a party primarily responds to an indicator if it aligns well with its political preferences. Using favorable indicators to make preferred issues salient, while ignoring unfavorable indicators appears to be straightforward strategy for a party who wants to realize its preferences. The only problem is that information does not always support the views of parties who favor an issue. With ever more easily available data, those parties also have to face indicators that they dislike. The aim of this chapter is to develop a theoretical argument of how they respond when this happens. PISA as an Indicator of Primary and Secondary School Problems The PISA tests provide a good test of the effect of international indicators for several reasons. The first relates to the strong air of competition surrounding the results. The OECD’s global position and powerful brand with many recognized indicators increase the pressure it puts on national political parties (Grek, 2009). Furthermore, the OECD publishes the PISA results with great display, and the publications normally receive a great deal of media attention (Dixon et al., 2013). PISA was also one of the first, and by far the largest, cross-national performance indicator on education policy. It allowed for easier comparisons and problem assessment on a policy issue where challenges were previously much more difficult to measure and where comparisons were problematic. Moreover, education is a popular issue that almost everyone agrees is a good thing.

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We hardly ever see parties arguing against education. Similarly, the overarching goals measured in PISA are widely agreed upon, considering that most people probably agree that reading and math are important skills to learn in school. At the same time, there are also reasons to expect that PISA may not constitute the easiest case for studying the impact of international indicators on parties’ issue emphasis. Education policy is generally anchored in individual countries and has little demand for coordination at the international level (Martens & Niemann, 2013). The OECD does also not carry any binding measures but relies on soft power to achieve its ends. Indicators such as PISA thus rely on making some political actors feel responsible for national performance. Furthermore, almost everyone has a personal experience with the education system, which implies that people hold relevant problem information themselves without having to rely on indicators. Finally, education can be described as a policy area with “wicked” problems because problems are difficult to measure while solutions are plentiful but, most often, have uncertain effects. For instance, it is often debated which skills are important to learn in school and possibly even more difficult to agree upon how they should be measured and compared across schools or countries. When an Indicator Disrupts Party Competition Although international indicators such as PISA appear objective, they are far from neutral. Information is purposive and indicators are politically biased constructs that reduce a complex reality which inevitably (and most often deliberately) focus on a few measurable aspects of a problem while leaving out others. As a public policy tool coming from the OECD, PISA also has a political bias. PISA primarily focuses on the economic aspects of education and promotes learning techniques related to this paradigm (Grek, 2009; Martens & Niemann, 2013). For instance, by testing pupils’ abilities in math, science, and reading, “PISA focuses primarily on the output of education systems and seeks to assess how well students are able to apply knowledge and skills learned in school to their future working life and thus contribute to the prosperity of the national economy” (Martens & Niemann, 2013, p. 315). PISA has largely changed which parties that benefit from emphasizing education policy. The fact that the OECD equates education and economic prosperity has conflicted with the views of parties with a

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liberal position on the new sociocultural value dimension, who tend to have the strongest commitments to investment in education (Beramendi, Häusermann, Kitschelt, & Kriesi, 2015; Kraft, 2018, Green-Pedersen & Jensen, 2019). The reason that socioculturally liberal parties prioritize education more than socioculturally conservative parties is that a futureoriented agenda with a focus on education appeals to their voter base. This primarily works through education, which is a powerful predictor of universalistic values. Highly educated people tend to have more cognitive capacities and material resources which are linked to prioritizing education. People with a liberal sociocultural position also tend to encompass a higher acceptance of uncertainty and to believe in the autonomy of all individuals, which are both compatible with long-term investment policies that manifest in the more distant future. Moreover, highly educated people have obtained their own advantageous situation as a result of long-term investment in education (Beramendi et al., 2015). PISA represents a policy paradigm that in many ways aligns better with a socioculturally conservative than a liberal position, because its policy recommendations are generally proposals that make education more tangible and decrease the uncertainty of the outcomes related to education policy. PISA takes focus away from less explicit educational aims such as broad social skills that resist measurement (e.g., democratic participation, artistic talents, understanding of politics, history), encompassed by socioculturally liberal parties, toward a more pragmatic view of how society benefits economically from education (Grek, 2009). For instance, PISA recommends creating national curriculums and standardized tests of core skills and knowledge to improve countries’ performance on the indicator which are measurable and concrete outputs of the education system that are directly relevant to working life and thus contribute to the national economy (Bieber & Martens, 2011; Knodel et al., 2013). Moreover, PISA has brought attention to new educational problems such as the lack of proper reading and math abilities in schools, generated by existing education policies that have often been designed by sociocultural liberal parties with the strongest commitment to the issue. In this way, PISA has brought forward politically charged information that has framed education policy in ways that have justified and legitimized the views of socioculturally conservative parties who have otherwise not prioritized the issue. How do parties respond when an indicator brings forward negative information that turns issue competition upside down as PISA did? How

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should we expect socioculturally liberal and conservative parties to adjust their issue emphasis to poor PISA scores? The most logical strategy for socioculturally conservative parties, who is suddenly provided with perfect ammunition in support of its policy solutions, is to utilize the beneficial situation and increase its attention to education policy. Parties who want to challenge the status quo can use international indicators such as PISA to highlight the problems of the current system and demonstrate that their alternative solutions are the right ones. As argued by Kingdon (1984), negative information from indicators opens “windows of opportunity” that parties can use to couple the policy, problem, and politics-streams. Moreover, the fact that PISA comes with readily available policy solutions to potential problems (Bieber & Martens, 2011; Kelley, 2017) is something that socioculturally conservative parties can utilize to put pressure on adherents of the status quo in poorly performing countries to either legitimate their model or adapt these solutions. Besides from the OECD’s own policy proposals, with international indicators new so-called “best practices” may also spread through benchmarking with top-performing countries. For instance, especially the Finnish education system attracted a lot of attention following Finland’s top-tier ranking in the PISA investigation (Gustafsson, 2012; Pons, 2012). In sum, with poor PISA scores, socioculturally conservative parties who initially preferred to talk little about education may decide that the issue has become attractive to engage with. How should we expect socioculturally liberal parties to respond to the unwelcome PISA indicator? Although the previous findings in the literature (Tavits & Potter, 2015) suggest that parties prefer to ignore indicators that challenge their preferences, I argue that the situation is different when a party prioritizes an issue strongly. When a party cares deeply about an issue as socioculturally liberal parties do with education, I do not expect them to surrender without a fight. The reasons are twofold. First, completely ignoring poor PISA scores may prove difficult for socioculturally liberal parties because they must expect conservative parties to politicize poor performances. Second, disregarding education precludes socioculturally liberal parties any influence over how the problems highlighted by PISA are framed in terms of causes and solutions (Stone, 1988). This does not appear to be an attractive strategy for parties who have strong commitments to the issue. In fact, a party’s room to maneuver is limited to those issues that elected politicians, elites within

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the party, and core voters prioritize (Egan, 2013). A party also has to cater to its partisans, especially if they care deeply about an issue, and it may prove difficult to convince these powerful actors that they should forget talking about an issue from one day to the other. At the same time, voters may be inclined to turn away from a party who seizes to invest attention to an issue that it has previously dedicated a great deal of attention to. Eventually, it may be better for socioculturally liberal parties to do something than do nothing, and mobilizing a counter-offensive may offer the most effective campaign strategy because, sometimes in politics, the best defense is a good offense. In this situation, increasing the parties’ attention to education by for instance advancing own solutions to the highlighted problems in education or questioning the validity of PISA and the opponents’ policy proposals may prove to effectively depoliticize PISA. Nevertheless, it is a dilemma with high stakes because, thereby, sociocultural liberal parties also risk attracting attention to the failures of current education policy and setting a reform agenda in motion that is very distant from their views. Their hope may be that the strategy turns out to be successful because socioculturally conservative parties will be more prone to withdraw from the issue considering that it is not dealing with an issue that it prioritizes strongly. Summing up on the effect of PISA and party preferences on parties’ issue emphasis discussed here, I expect that both socioculturally conservative and liberal parties have an incentive to respond to information from international indicators such as PISA to show that they are responsive to a salient problem. This generates the first hypothesis concerning the direct effect of PISA. Hypothesis 1: When the PISA scores are poor, they are more likely to generate attention from political parties. However, I expect that socio-culturally liberal parties exhibit the strongest response to poor PISA results, because they feel forced to go on the offensive in an attempt to defend their strong commitments to the education issue. I expect them to choose this strategy as the lesser of several evils in the dilemma that PISA puts them in. This generates the second hypothesis. Hypothesis 2: Parties with a liberal position on the sociocultural dimension will respond more strongly to the PISA scores.

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Research Design, Data, and Effects To test my argument, I have collected data on PISA scores, parties’ political attention, and party positions. The data on PISA scores covers six Western European countries (Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom) from the first results were published in 2001 until 2015. These six countries are well suited for the analysis because they represent both centralized and decentralized education systems, a range of different experiences with measuring performance in school, and varying performances in PISA over time as shown in Fig. 11.1. Furthermore, including parliamentary and presidential systems as well as political systems with both multiple and few parties strengthen the generalizability of the findings. By testing the skills of 15-year-olds, PISA evaluates the performance of school systems leading up to the point in time where pupils attend either primary or lower secondary school. What is needed is thus a measure of party emphasis of primary and secondary education that is also comparable across countries. The most common measure of parties’ issue

Fig. 11.1 PISA scores

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emphasis is the Comparative Manifesto Project (Klingemann, Volkens, Bara, & Budge, 2006). However, when studying attention to education, one drawback of CMP is that the two-issue categories that relate to education, “Education expansion” (506) and “Education limitation” (507), do not distinguish between attention to primary, secondary, and higher education but mixes attention to education at all levels. Instead, I use the Comparative Agendas Project’s (CAP) coding scheme. With 21 issues, further divided into 213 sub-issues in the master codebook, this coding scheme contains a great complexity that is rarely used by scholars. With regard to education policy, all sentences that relate to primary and secondary education (subcategory “602”) have been coded based on a similar definition across the six countries, including questions relating to subject composition, national curriculum, class sizes, and dropout rates. I deliberately do not look specifically at attention to PISA or school tests, since I am interested in whether PISA ignites a broader political debate about primary and secondary education policy where parties advance their preferred solutions which may not relate to PISA and testing. For all countries, I include manifestos from parties that won representation either before or after a given election. In total the data covers 49 different parties across 25 different elections. On average there are 1.4 years between the PISA results are published and a national election is held. The fact that some time passes between PISA and the national elections ensures that parties have sufficient time to take the PISA results into account when writing their election manifesto. However, as the number of days is still limited, the PISA results should remain salient. To measure the dependent variable, I calculate each party’s attention by dividing the number of sentences in a manifesto about primary and secondary education with the total number of sentences. On average, 3.1% of the manifestos are devoted to primary and secondary education. The Independent Variables The three main independent variables are the PISA scores, the development in scores, and parties’ sociocultural position. In the first round in 2000, the OECD calculated the PISA reading, math, and science scores respectively so that the average scores were 500 and the standard deviation 100 among the participating OECD countries. Higher scores indicate better skills. In each round, PISA reuses some of the same tasks,

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which allows for comparison over time. As a measure of a country’s PISA score, I have calculated the average score across the three subject areas. The effect of the independent variables therefore represents the effect of a country’s general performance across all three subject areas. Finally, I reversed the variable so that higher values represent worse scores. To measure parties’ position on the sociocultural dimension, I rely on Bakker and Hobolt’s (2012) measure, which is constructed using CMP data. The measure is based on categories such as political authority, national way of life, multiculturalism, and law and order. Following the approach by Dolezal, Ennser-Jedenastik, Müller, and Winkler (2014), I calculate the indicator by subtracting liberal issue categories from conservative issue categories and dividing them by the sum of all categories. The measure ranges from 1 (most conservative) to 1 (most liberal). I include a number of control variables. First, I control for a party’s position on the state-market dimension, which the literature suggests could affect how parties prioritize education policy (Ansell, 2010). Like the sociocultural value dimension, the state-market indicator has been calculated by subtracting leftist categories in the CMP data from rightist categories and then dividing them by their sum (Bakker & Hobolt, 2012). The state-market dimension is captured by the use of categories such as free enterprise, economic incentives, and welfare state limitation or expansion. Second, I control whether a party adheres to a mainstream ideology or not. I do this to ensure that the effect of the CMP index reflects differences in party preferences rather than ideology type. I follow standard practice and code Christian democratic, conservative, social democratic, and liberal families as mainstream ideologies (Adams et al., 2006). Third, I control for whether a party was in opposition (1) or government (0) prior to the election. Fourth, to account for the variation in time between PISA publications and elections, I control for the number of days between PISA is published and each election. Estimation Strategy I treat the data as a pooled time series, where political parties at each election are the cross-sectional units. My hypotheses predict that differences in both parties’ position and countries’ PISA scores explain variation in levels of party attention. Employing a fixed effects model to control for time-invariant country-specific and/or party-specific factors would completely absorb differences in positions across parties and PISA scores

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across countries. For instance, fixed effects would ignore the fact that parties in poor-performing countries are more likely to devote attention to PISA compared to parties in top-performing countries. Moreover, although a party’s position is in principle time-variant, many parties do not change their position much, which makes a fixed effects approach unfeasible. Similarly, the PISA scores have mostly been stable in countries such as Denmark and France. For these reasons, “allowing for a mild bias resulting from omitted variables is less harmful than running a fixed effect specification” (Plümper, Troeger, & Manow, 2005, p. 343). I therefore follow this recommendation and specified random effects. However, the results do not change if I specify country fixed effects that account for factors within the national contexts which may make education a more prominent issue for parties. To correct for autocorrelation problems in panel data, I employ a Prais-Winsten transformation technique with panel-corrected standard errors, but the results are similar if I use traditional OLS regressions.

The PISA Effect on Party Attention to Education In this section, I present the empirical results from the analysis of parties’ attention to primary and secondary education. Figure 11.2 shows attention to primary and secondary education over time across all six countries from 1981 to 2015. When examining how party attention relates to the PISA results, Fig. 11.2 presents a somewhat mixed pattern. In Denmark, Fig. 11.2 shows that continuing poor results have contributed to more and more attention to education over time. In Germany, the first results in 2001 that were well below the OECD average also generated a small spike in attention to education. Although small, this spike is in fact significant considering that we should expect little attention to education policy from national actors in Germany because education policy is decentralized to regional authorities. It reflects the famous “PISA shock” that the first German results generated (Martens & Niemann, 2013). Since that shock, German pupils have performed better over the years, and schools have not been a major theme at national elections. Research suggests that the results came as a surprise in Denmark and Germany, because politicians in both countries believed that their education systems were among the best in Europe while they at the same time had no tradition of standardized tests in schools prior

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Note: The vertical dashed lines mark the publication of PISA results. Fig. 11.2 Attention to primary and secondary education by country (Note The vertical dashed lines mark the publication of PISA results)

to PISA (Gustafsson, 2012; Martens & Niemann, 2013). PISA clearly exposed that they were wrong. Swedish parties reduced their attention to education policy following the good results in the first PISA round. However, as Sweden’s performance has plummeted from multiple top 10 rankings to barely making it into top 30 in any of the subject areas, Swedish parties have become more and more occupied with education over the years. As another international top-performer in the first round, the PISA scores also did not generate a great deal of attention in the Netherlands. However, since the country’s performance has deteriorated, Dutch parties have increasingly taken up the issue of primary and secondary education. The UK was also a top-performer in the first PISA test, ranking in the top 10 across all three subject areas. Despite a dramatic decrease in the country’s performance in all three subject areas, attention to schools has been declining over the years. Knodel et al. (2013) suggest that one of the reasons why political actors in the UK have not responded to the

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country’s decline in PISA is that the UK already had a long tradition of testing in schools prior to PISA, which meant that PISA was perceived as less novel in the UK compared to in countries such as Denmark and Germany with no such tradition. Similar to the UK, parties in France have not devoted much attention to education, despite average or below average results throughout all the tests. However in contrast to the UK, Pons (2012) suggests that French policy-makers have been eager to reject PISA as an Anglo-Saxon policy tool that does not account for French exceptionalism. Although illustrative, these broad trends do not tell us much about the different responses of socioculturally liberal and conservative parties. Therefore, I now model the relationship between the PISA scores and party attention across all six countries. Table 11.1 presents the results from the time-series cross-sectional regression analysis. Model 1 tests Table 11.1 Estimating parties’ level of attention to primary and secondary education

PISA score

(1) Model 1

(2) Model 2

(3) Model 3

(4) Model 4

0.071* (0.021)

0.137* (0.026) 0.206* (0.031)

0.056c (0.021)

0.043a (0.024)

−4.864b (1.919) 0.152c (0.054)

−5.980c (1.882) 0.183* (0.050) −0.002 (0.001) 1.463a (0.815) 0.475 (1.580) 1.309c (0.444) 0.370 (1.283) 140 0.205

PISA score change Socio-cultural position Pisa score X Socio-cultural position Days between PISA and election Mainstream ideology State-market In opposition Constant N R2

0.794 (0.611) 140 0.160

−4.882* (1.116) 104 0.167

1.068a (0.604) 140 0.211

a p < 0.10, b p < 0.05, c p < 0.01, * p < 0.001. Panel-corrected standard errors in parentheses

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whether parties are more likely to devote attention to primary and secondary education when PISA scores are poor. As expected, parties do focus more on primary and secondary education, the worse the PISA scores are (p-value = 0.001). A score that is 20 point worse, corresponding to little more than a standard deviation or the difference between Denmark and Sweden in 2001, leads to an expected increase in attention of 1.4%. This is a sizeable effect, considering that the average attention to primary and secondary education is 3.1%. Model 2 introduces a variable for the change in the PISA scores from the previous round. This reduces the number of cases because all cases from the elections following the first PISA round are excluded. The model shows that declining scores have a positive effect on issue attention. On average, seven points worsening, approximately one standard deviation equivalent to the Swedish decline from the first to the second round, generates 1.4% more attention to primary and secondary education (pvalue: 0.000). Furthermore, model 2 shows that the effect of the PISA score variable actually increases its size from 0.071 to 0.137 when controlling for changes in scores. I thus find support for hypotheses 1. Parties both take information from international indicators about the size and development of problems into account when they decide whether or not to emphasize an issue. These findings replicate if using a country’s average ranking across the three disciplines instead of the scores. I now turn to how parties with different positions of the sociocultural value dimension have responded to the PISA scores. Model 3 introduces the interaction term between the PISA scores and parties’ sociocultural position, while model 4 includes all the control variables.1 The interaction term in model 4 indicates that a party’s response to PISA is moderated by its sociocultural position. As expected, the interaction coefficient is positive and statistically significant, which suggests that socioculturally liberal parties are most responsive to the PISA scores (p-value: 0.005). Because of the interaction term, the main effect of the PISA score shows the effect among the parties who are neither socioculturally liberal nor conservative (0). In Fig. 11.3, I therefore graph the marginal effect of PISA scores across parties’ sociocultural positions. Figure 11.3 shows that while liberal parties (> 0) are quite responsive to the PISA scores, they do not have an effect for parties with a conservative position (< 0), despite the alignment between their conservative preferences and the PISA tests. These findings replicate if using data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (Polk et al., 2017) to measure parties’ sociocultural values.

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Note: Calculated based on model 4 in Table 1. Fig. 11.3 Marginal effect of PISA score on attention to primary and secondary education (Note Calculated based on model 4 in Table 11.1)

To exemplify these quantitative results I also present some examples from the Danish 2005 and British 2015 manifestos that illustrate how the struggle over the definition of PISA as a policy problem has unfolded between socioculturally liberal and conservative parties. PISA had recently published its second round of results before the Danish 2005 election. For the second time in a row, Danish pupils performed close to the OECD average. Primary and secondary education had therefore been a highly salient issue in the period up to the election. Especially Denmark’s poor performance relative to its Scandinavian neighbors, Finland and Sweden, was a dominant theme (Gustafsson, 2012). This also reflected in the party manifestos where education took up five percent making it one of the most important issues. As expected, socioculturally conservative parties such as the Liberals and the Conservatives were generally most aligned with the PISA tests. They utilized PISA to underline the failures and argue for reforms of the Danish education system. In their 2005 manifesto, the main government

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parties, the Liberals (avg. sociocultural position = −0.15) suggested new standardized test in Danish primary schools: [We will] enact compulsory tests on selected grades – as a tool to secure the fulfillment of the binding goals concerning what pupils should learn in each grade. The tests should be a pedagogical tool that the teacher can use to secure progress for the individual pupil by designing the teaching according to individual skills. (Liberals, 2005)

In comparison, socioculturally liberal parties in Denmark took a much more sceptical stance on testing. As expected, they questioned both the validity of PISA and criticized government attempts to bring tests into schools and enact a national curriculum. The following quote from the Socialist People’s Party’s 2005 manifesto (avg. sociocultural position = 0.60) highlights how school tests clashed with socioculturally liberal values such as individual autonomy and personal self-fulfillment: We want children who learn and develop into independent, creative democratic citizens … The right wing suffers from the delusion that more centralism, rote learning, and centrally determined tests solve the problems … The children must learn something, but they must also be creative and obtain social skills. They must be whole persons. (Socialist People’s Party, 2005)

In the UK, education has been a recurrent issue of debate over the years as shown in Fig. 11.2. However, it was not until the 2010 and 2015 elections after years of worsening results in PISA that the UK’s performance in the international league table became a key theme in the manifestos. The following quote from the Conservatives’ (avg. sociocultural position = −0.25) 2015 manifesto, the governing party at the time, shows that the most socioculturally conservative party in the UK utilized the poor PISA results to criticize the British education system. We inherited a system where far too many children left school without the qualifications and skills they needed. One in three children was leaving primary school unable to read, write and add up properly… Our schools have fallen down the global league tables for maths and science. (Conservatives, 2015)

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The Conservatives were clearly aligned with PISA’s approach to education reform and even proposed specific goals concerning the country’s performance in PISA: We will start by introducing tough new standards for literacy and numeracy in primary schools. We will expect every 11-year-old to know their times tables off by heart and be able to perform long division and complex multiplication. They should be able to read a book and write a short story with accurate punctuation, spelling and grammar … We aim to make Britain the best place in the world to study maths, science and engineering, measured by improved performance in the PISA league tables. (Conservatives, 2015)

In comparison, the more socioculturally liberal Labour party (avg. sociocultural position = 0.07) expressed pessimism toward more testing and centralism in their manifesto. Instead, Labour emphasized the importance of creativity and broader social skills, which are values that align well with a socioculturally liberal approach to education policy. A good education is vital to achieving personal fulfillment and economic prosperity. A good society depends upon an education system that can open minds and teach the skills and knowledge we each need to get on in life … Children develop and learn best when they are secure and happy. We need to help our children develop the creativity, self-awareness and emotional skills they need to get on in life. (Labour, 2015)

In sum, there is strong evidence in support of hypothesis 2. The regression results and the examples from Denmark and the UK illustrate that socioculturally conservative parties were most positive toward testing and creating national learning goals. In response, socioculturally liberal parties went on the offensive, increased their attention to education and fiercely criticized their opponents’ policy proposals while defending their own views. In this way, they tried to defend their dominance on the education issue, which had been strongly challenged by PISA and its adherents.

Conclusion International indicators are constructs that have become increasingly influential in politics. This chapter has examined how parties behave when a new indicator from an international organization disrupts party issue competition dynamics by bringing forward problematic information that

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depicts an issue in ways disfavored by parties who normally dominate and prioritize an issue. Utilizing the OECD’s PISA tests and detailed data on party attention to primary and secondary education across six Western European countries over a 15-year period, it finds evidence that parties devote more attention to primary and secondary education when PISA scores are poor and develop poorly. These findings add an important contribution to our understanding of the significance of indicators to issue competition. Rather than only sticking to favorable issues, this study shows that parties engage with indicators when they bring bad news. At the same time, the chapter provides evidence that party competition pervades how parties respond to international indicators. Relying on regression results and examples from the Danish 2005 and British 2015 election manifestos, it shows that parties who have strong political commitments to an issue try to denounce international indicators that do not support their views. Parties with a liberal position on the sociocultural value dimension who prioritize education but disfavor PISA’s focus on the economic returns of education policies responded to PISA by increasing their attention to the education issue, criticizing PISA and its adherents. By showing how parties have struggled over the definition of PISA as a national policy problem, the chapter suggests that the effects of international indicators largely depends on how indicators play together with existing party competition. Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the chapter highlights some interesting cross-national similarities in how parties in different countries respond to PISA that the existing literature has not accounted for. Plenty of studies on the policy-impact of PISA have argued that countries have responded to PISA to a different degree, because of differences in educational systems and varying traditions of testing in schools (Grek, 2009; Knodel et al., 2013; Martens & Niemann, 2013). This chapter suggests that countries at the same time face similar challenges on education policies, to be competitive internationally, which cause them to respond similarly to PISA. One reason is that advanced industrial countries have all undergone a process of deindustrialization that has facilitated the emergence of a “knowledge economy,” where education has become an increasingly important issue. Therefore, international performance indicators such as PISA have come to play an increasingly important role in most countries. Relatedly, the chapter also shows some cross-national similarities in how parties struggle over the definition of PISA as a policy

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problem: Socioculturally liberal parties across countries tend to disfavor PISA and try to dismantle it. Since the divide between socioculturally liberal and conservative parties exists in most countries the result is likely to be broadly generalizable.

Note 1. I do not include the variable “PISA score change” in models 3 and 4, because no statistically significant interaction exists with “Socio-cultural position”. Including change in the model would limit the number of cases since data would be omitted from elections that links to the first PISA round.

References Adams, J., Clark, M., Ezrow, L., & Glasgow, G. (2006). Are niche parties fundamentally different from mainstream parties? The causes and the electoral consequences of western european parties’ policy shifts, 1976–1998. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 513–529. Ansell, B. W. (2010). From the ballot to the blackboard: The redistributive political economy of education. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bakker, R., & Hobolt, S. B. (2012). Measuring party positions. In G. Evans & N. D. De Graaf (Eds.), Political choice matters (pp. 27–45). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bandura, R. (2008). A survey of composite indices measuring country performance: 2008 update (UNDP/ODS Working Paper). New York: United Nations Development Programme, Office of Development Studies. Baumgartner, F. R., Jones, B. D., & Wilkerson, J. (2011). Comparative studies of policy dynamics. Comparative Political Studies, 44(8), 947–972. Beramendi, P., Häusermann, S., Kitschelt, H., & Kriesi, H. (2015). The politics of advanced capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bieber, T., & Martens, K. (2011). The OECD PISA study as a soft power in education? Lessons from Switzerland and the US. European Journal of Education, 46(1), 101–116. Budge, I., & Farlie, D. (1983). Party competition—Selective emphasis or direct confrontation? An alternative view with data. In H. Daalder & P. Mair (Eds.), West european party systems: Continuity & change (pp. 267–305). London: Sage Publications. Carmines, E. G. (1991). The logic of party alignments. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 3(1), 65–80.

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Dalton, R. J., Farrell, D. M., & McAllister, I. (2011). Political parties & democratic linkage, how parties organize democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, K., Fisher, A., Kingsbury, B., & Merry, S. E. (2012). Governance by indicators: Global power through classification and rankings. New York: Oxford University Press. Dixon, R., Arndt, C., Mullers, M., Vakkuri, J., Engblom-Pelkkala, K., & Hood, C. (2013). A lever from improvement or a magnet for blame? Press and political responses to international educational ranking in four EU countries. Public Administration, 91(2), 484–505. Dolezal, M., Ennser-Jedenastik, L., Müller, W. C., & Winkler, A. K. (2014). How parties compete for votes: A test of saliency theory. European Journal of Political Research, 53(1), 57–76. Doshi, R., Kelley, J. G., & Simmons, B. A. (2019). The power of ranking: The ease of doing business indicator and global regulatory behavior. International Organization, 73(3), 611–643. Egan, P. J. (2013). Partisan priorities: How issue ownership drives and distorts american politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Green-Pedersen, C., & Jensen, C. (2019). Electoral competition and the welfare state. Western European Politics, 42(4), 803–823. Grek, S. (2009). Governing by numbers: The PISA ‘effect’ in Europe. Journal of Education Policy, 24(1), 23–37. Gustafsson, L. R. (2012). What did you learn in school today? How ideas mattered for policy changes in Danish and Swedish schools 1990–2011. Aarhus: Politica. Kelley, J. D. (2017). Scorecard diplomacy: Grading states to influence their reputation and behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelley, J. D., & Simmons, B. A. (2015). Politics by number: Indicators as social pressure in international relations. American Journal of Political Science, 59(1), 55–70. Kingdon, J. W. (1984). Agendas, alternatives and public policies. New York: Longman. Klingemann, H. D., Volkens, A., Bara, J., & Budge, I. (2006). Mapping policy preferences II: Estimates for parties, electors, and governments in Eastern Europe, European Union, and OECD 1990–2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knodel, P., Martens, K., & Niemann, D. (2013). PISA as an ideational roadmap for policy change: Exploring Germany and England in a comparative perspective. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 11(3), 421–441. Kraft, J. (2018). Political parties and public investment: A comparative analysis of 22 western democracies. West European Politics, 41(1), 128–146.

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Martens, K., & Niemann, D. (2013). When do numbers count? The differential impact of the PISA rating and ranking on education policy in Germany and the US. German Politics, 22(3), 314–332. Moynihan, D. P. (2008). The dynamics of performance management: Constructing information and reform. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Mügge, D. (2016). Studying macroeconomic indicators as powerful ideas. Journal of European Public Policy, 23(3), 410–427. Neveu, E. (2017). How do social problems and social conflicts travel across borders? Journal of Conflict and Integration, 1(1), 8–38. Pardos-Prado, S., & Sagarzazu, I. (2019). Economic responsiveness and the political conditioning of the electoral cycle. The Journal of Politics, 81(2), 441–455. Petrocik, J. (1996). Issue-ownership in presidential elections with a 1980 case study. American Journal of Political Science, 40(3), 825–850. Plümper, T., Troeger, V. E., & Manow, P. (2005). Panel data analysis in comparative politics: Linking method to theory. European Journal of Political Research, 44(2), 327–354. Polk, J., Rovny, J., Bakker, R., Edwards, E., Hooghe, L., Jolly S., Koedam, J. … Zilovic, M. (2017). Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill expert survey data. Research & Politics, 1–9. Pons, X. (2012). Going beyond the ‘PISA shock’ discourse: An Analysis of the cognitive reception of PISA in six European countries, 2001–2008. European Educational Research Journal, 11(2), 206–226. Simon, A. F. (2002). The winning message. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stone, D. A. (1988). Policy paradox: The art of political decision making. NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company. Tavits, M., & Potter, J. D. (2015). The effect of inequality and social identity on party strategies. American Journal of Political Science, 59(3), 744–758. Traber, D., Schoonvelde, M., & Schumacher, G. (2019). Errors have been made, others will be blamed: Issue engagement and blame shifting in prime minister speeches during the Economic crisis in Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 1–23.

CHAPTER 12

From the National to the European and Back: A Structural Reading of the Circulation of a Policy Frame Across Borders Matthieu Ansaloni

Introduction In 2002 The Policy commission on the future of farming and food made public a report that the Prime Minister Tony Blair commissioned the year before. Donald Curry, as chairman of the Policy commission, argued: “Government has supported the industry for fifty years—it has a moral duty to help as the industry transforms itself and breaks away from subsidy. The Government should reward farmers for the public goods they provide. It should ensure that markets operate fairly and efficiently. However, its job is to facilitate change—not to fund stagnation1 ”. A motto summed up the project it drew upon: “the guiding principle must be that public money should be used to pay for public goods that the public wants and needs” (p. 23). A new project was set up for agricultural policy: rather than supporting agricultural production (which supplies “private goods” rewarded by the “market”) public

M. Ansaloni (B) INRAE/AGIR-Odycée, Toulouse, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_12

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money should reward “public goods” for which the “market” is failing. For its promoters, this project was supposed to tackle a set of problems intensified by the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), from budgetary cost to market disequilibrium and environmental degradation. In the name of the Commission Donald Curry called the government for a sound reform of the national agricultural policy, using the latitude offered by the CAP. That has to be achieved by 2005 when the government allotted to environmental payments the maximum amount permitted by the provisions of the CAP, thereby according it nearly a quarter of the farming budget, the highest proportion within the European Union (EU).2 By doing so Tony Blair’s government made England the experimental laboratory for anew agricultural policy. Within the concert of the European member states, England (in the name of the United Kingdom—UK) then stood as the main advocate for a CAP reshaped on the basis of the public good vision.3 Understanding this policy shift necessitates an in-depth analysis of the action of those who, in and from England, held this project. Indeed, the economic history of the UK sheds some lights on the change imposed by the New labor government in farming policy. At the end of the nineteenth century, during the Great Depression, agriculture has been sacrificed on the altar of the commercial and financial interests that made up the Empire’s wealth (Hobsbawn, 1977). Unification of world markets encouraged the departure of peasants to cities, thereby destroying their way of life. Indeed, the invention of the English “natural landscape”—a production of the landed aristocracy—has been analyzed as the negation of the productive work of those who at the same time were condemned to disappear (Williams, 1977). Following that track, the inflexion propelled by the New labor government to the farming policy would continue a long-term choice of macroeconomic policy, focused on low-cost food, a condition of low wages, ensuring a competitive economic position in world economic exchanges. Destroying the peasant class, marginalizing the contribution of agriculture in the national economy, this long-term policy choice would later limit the capacity of farmers. This track nevertheless needs further explanation. In the aftermath of the last war, the social image of farmers had a high profile in the national mythology: their participation in the war effort, which allowed a drastic increase in national production satisfying the needs of the population, was at the heart of “a representation of agriculture as

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an efficient industry, demonstrating [more than anything else] the possibilities of modernization” (Hobsbawn, 1977, p. 180). Consequence of an authoritarian planning conducted jointly by the state and the main agricultural union (the National Farmers’ Union—NFU), this success story generated a “special treatment” (in the light of the other industries) for agriculture during the post-war period: supported by state subsidies, agricultural “expansion” was seen as a mean to counterbalance the deterioration of the United Kingdom’s trade balance. Continuously backed by (left and right wings) governments until the accession to the European Economic Community (EEC), this “special treatment” generated a popular field of investigation for British political scientists, inspiring them new theorizations—“pressure group” (Grant, 1995), “policy community” (Jordan, Maloney, & McLaughlin, 1994; Smith, 1990) or “policy network” (Marsh & Smith, 2000). However, the policy shift enacted by the New Labor government brought this “special treatment” and its beneficiaries into question. Thus understanding fully the inflexion propelled by the New Labor government to national farming policy implies grasping the action of those who in England had the ownership (Gusfield, 1989) of the agricultural issue, obtaining in that way a monopoly of power over the relevant segment of the state at the expense of traditional agricultural elites. To do so one needs to analyze the “detour” by Brussels that the advocates of the reform—a set of environmental activists, consultants, and economists—has done at the beginning of the 1990. If they then occupied a marginal position in the English field of production of the farming policy, their project echoed the orientations of a fraction of civil servants of the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development at the European Commission (EC). There a reform trend had already been initiated: legislative changes had been obtained. The public good vision was thus endowed of the symbolic and practical forces of the European law. At the beginning of 2000, in England, the foot and mouth crisis followed that of the mad cow. The New Labor government—the Cabinet office especially—then adopted the public good vision, building the reform on those who favored its inscription in the European law. By doing so, the core executive pushed aside the traditional agricultural alliance made of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Farming (MAFF) and of the NFU. Following that reading, understanding the inflexion propelled by the New Labor government to the agricultural policy requires analyzing the circulation, between the national and the European scales,4 of a policy frame

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(Jobert & Muller, 1987) which had been enshrined in law by English and European authorities. This reading especially necessitates grasping how the frame, which ostensibly would solve a set of problems caused by the CAP implementation, traveled between London and Brussels without its content being altered. Indeed, this will be the main aim of this chapter. We will shed light on the action of those who held the public good vision between London and Brussels. Our demonstration stands in stark contrast with the proponents of constructivist institutionalism: from that perspective the circulation of the frame has to be analyzed in the light of the persuasion work made by its promoters whose success allowed the “reconstruction” of the interest of their opponents (Hay, 2016). The empirical findings presented in this chapter give instead credit to a structural perspective (Théret, 2003), according to which the high degree of fit between the social attributes of those who—In London and Brussels—promoted the frame is what explain its circulation: these agents are similar to the “econocrats” sketched by Aeron Davis (2017), people who—having educational or professional experiences in economics or related disciplines such accounting—share a common ideology and tools which allowed their social mobility. If those who in London and Brussels held common social attributes, they also occupied a similar position in the field of production of the farming policy in which they are involved. In England and in Brussels, those who held the public good vision were marginalized in their respective field. Rather than “redefining” the interest of their opponents (especially farmers’ representatives), that project allowed them to weave new alliances in order to enhance their position in the balances of power in which they were involved. In other words, “ideas” (here a policy frame) cannot be analyzed without considering the social context(s) in which they are elaborated and promoted. Such a structural reading clearly converges with some studies on public problems, both seminal (e.g. Gusfield, 1989) and contemporary ones (e.g. Campana, Henry, & Rowell, 2007). This chapter aims at tracing the map of relationships (Dubois, 2014; Itçaina, Roger, & Smith, 2016) on which the agricultural policy of the New Labor rested on. The purpose of our empirical survey was to characterize the position of the agents who weaved those relationships by identifying their social attributes which derive from the types of capital they hold (Neveu, 2013). In order to put in practice this approach, particular attention has been paid to “neutral spaces” (Boltanski & Bourdieu, 2008). Located at the intersection of the scientific and bureaucratic fields,

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these are the ideological laboratories within which dominant forms of thinking are developed. Our investigation especially focused on a firm of London-based consultants—the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP)—where the public good vision was largely defined. Our investigation also focused on official commissions in London and in Brussels where that vision has been enshrined, that is to say transformed into official visions. In order to understand how the policy frame has traveled without being altered attention has been paid to the social attributes of the people who sat in these bodies (highlighting their inclination to adopt the frame) and on their positions (highlighting what was the opportunity for them to adopt it). In addition to written sources (administrative literature, economics literature, position papers), this chapter is based on 50 semi-directed interviews carried out in London and Brussels in 2008–2009 with agents who were at the core of the map of relationships highlighted. The first part of this piece, which aims at tracking the origins of the public good vision, pays attention to the ideological work carried out by people revolving around the IEEP (1). By analyzing the alliances which they forged on this basis at the European and English scales, the parts that follow concentrate upon the enshrinement of this policy frame, first in Brussels (2), then in England (3).

The Origins of the Vision in Terms of Public Good The vision in terms of public good which stood at the heart of the New Labor’s farming policy had its roots in two distinct fields, that of environmentalist campaigners and that of agricultural economists. At the end of the 1970s the coming into force of the CAP which followed the UK’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) led some of their agents to grapple anew with the farming question. Among the environmentalists, the CAP became a major stake of struggles, not only because of the supposed effects of this policy on the natural environment, but also because of its budget which, potentially, could be turned toward new goals, environmental protection in particular. The trial of the CAP began. Multiple voices rose. Campaigning was not low-key: from the 1970s, environmental organizations experienced an unheard-of-increase in their social base (Evans, 1997). This was the case for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), a charity founded at the end of the ninetieth century reputed the largest environmentalist organization

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in the world. In 1970, it had 117,900 members; at the start of the 1990s they numbered 980,000 and ten years later more than a million. The stands of environmental activists thus had a great impact. An example of this was the book published by a CPRE activist, Marion Shoard, titled The theft of the countryside,5 which when it appeared in 1980 became a bestseller (Sheail, 1995). For their part, agricultural economists, who held posts in university economics departments, looked favorably on the UK’s joining the EEC (Colman, 1989): the CAP—the main policy community—offered them a field of investigation seen as fertile, because likely to cast a favorable light on their specialty in the eyes of their peers. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher launched during a European summit her famous “I want my money back,” engaging a fight on the British contribution to the community budget. In 1982 Allan Buckwell and his colleagues at Newcastle University offered a scientific argument with The Costs of the CAP. The trial leaded by economists against the CAP did not neglect its (presumed) environmental misdeeds: in Agriculture, the Countryside and Land Use: An Economic Critique (1983), John Bowers and Paul Cheshire—professor and lecturer at the Universities of Reading and Leeds—analyzed the “destruction of the English countryside” (p. 1), theorizing the link between PAC, agricultural intensification and environmental damage. At this point, those among environmentalists and agricultural economists who were targeting farming policy though did not have direct contacts. They would do this through the intermediation of the IEEP, when RSPB leaders took the forefront of the environmentalists struggle against the CAP6 : this was the time, at the end of the 1980s, when they formed a dedicated team to focus on the CAP—a team which would have around fifteen members ten years later. Founded and initially financed in 1976 by the European Cultural Foundation (a think-tank created in 1954 to favor the European unity, firstly presided by Robert Schuman), the IEEP was given the mission of promoting the production of what its leaders described as thinking aimed at the development of a European environmental policy that would be “robust” and “informed” but also “independent” of political authorities, both national and European.7 After some hesitation, the location for the body was decided in 1990, with the headquarters in London while a branch was opened in Brussels, making concrete its European ambitions. A young Cambridge University graduate in economics and philosophy, David Baldock, gradually came to the fore at the head of the body: hired in 1983 having earned his spurs with Friends of the

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Earth, he was put in charge of a program examining the environmental impact of some CAP’ tools. To do so he rested on the work agricultural economists such as Bowers and Cheshire developed at the same time. The pioneering nature of his expertise gave him prestige which would make him an expert—if not the expert—on farming questions in the eyes of English environmentalist campaigners. This aura enabled him to seize a valuable opportunity: convinced of the deleterious effects of the CAP on the environment, and with significant resources at their disposal, environmentalist campaigners—particularly those from the RSPB—were in search of expertise with which to lead their offense. Bolstered by his commercial success,8 David Baldock became Deputy of the IEEP in 1992 and then its Director in 1998, period when the firm expanded dramatically its activity. Except in the case of its leaders, the firm is not a body where agents make their career: it is for people in their thirties who began their career in an environmental administration, an environmental organization or a university, a springboard toward positions seen as advantageous. Those who were at the heart of the struggle against the CAP—Janet Dwyer and Vicki Swales who led the team dedicated to agricultural issue—exhibit similar social attributes. Like David Baldock, they possessed an important educational background, gained in the most famous universities of the Kingdom, made of a double specialization, in economics and in natural science. They also maintained closed contact with environmental organizations—the National Trust for Janet Dwyer (of which she later became member of the Board of trustees), the RSPB for Vicki Swales—of which she led, before joining the IEEP, the agricultural team). Lastly, the capitals they owned—their competence in economics in particular—allowed them to obtain multiples positions, in various social spaces, leading to successful careers: after working for the Environmental administration and the IEEP, Janet Dwyer will hold a post of Rural professor at the University of Gloucester; Vicki Swales, building on experiences at the RSPB and at the IEEP, will establish his own consultancy firm. Aware of their endowments, the leaders of the IEEP—DavidBaldock in particular—did not hesitate to stage their social attributes to build the expert authority of their venture, giving it a universal veneer, then masking the conflicts which surrounded the production of his knowledge and creating the fiction of his independence: the team’s European dimension threw a veil over the national divisions; scientific investments represent the knowledge they produced as apolitical, true because objective; finally, by setting up a Board of trustees the leaders of the IEEP decked their firm out with

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the authority of prestigious people who made brilliant careers culminating in heading an Environmental agency (the European one, for example) and/or an environmental organization (the RSPB, for example). During the 1990s, the ideological work which was made within the wall of the IEEP built gradually on the public good concept. This orientation bears the mark of Ian Hodge, an Economics professor at Cambridge, who, in a pioneering article written with an American colleague (Bromley & Hodge, 1990), applied this concept to farming policy. This work was the cornerstone of the intellectual enterprise pursued by IEEP consultants for whom the Cambridge professor constituted a sort of tutelary figure: in 1993, he chaired the OECD working group on Agriculture and Environment in which David Baldock was a participant from the time it was set up; Ian Hodge also supervised Janet Dwyer’s Ph.D. thesis before she joined the IEEP. The public good concept, beyond neoclassical economics (more exactly, welfare economics), gave to IEEP consultants an intellectual basis with which they gradually produced an economic policy doctrine offering operational responses to the problems met by civil servants. This intellectual basis also constituted a tool to construct the inevitability of the changes they were advocating. For agricultural economics such Allan Buckwell, the public good concept was the only one way forward possible for the CAP: for them, its dismantling was no longer dictated merely by the economic efficiency imperative; the inclusion of farming within the international trade negotiations in the mid-1980s condemned the CAP in the short term. For those economists, farming policy (public policy in general) should be strictly limited to correcting “market failures,” including “public goods.” In the mid-1990s, the public good vision was advocated by the RSPB. Whereas, at the end of the 1980s, its leaders were pleading for a policy which would not be agricultural but “rural,” arguing among other objectives for remuneration of services, especially environmental services, some years later they put the concept of public goods at the heart of their demands. In similar fashion to agricultural economists, invoking certain socio-economic trends was used to construct the inevitability of the changes they were advocating while at the same time discrediting competing points of view. For them, the public good vision, because it is based on the market, was the only way forward possible for the future of the CAP: it was very much in line with the GATT; while limiting the CAP’s field of application (especially price supports and compensation payments), it made it possible to extend it to countries wishing to join

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the EU. This unparalleled commitment by RSPB leaders to the CAP was used by them to take charge of the farming activities and policy orientations within Wildlife and Countryside Link, the English’s environmentalist umbrella organization, whose budget they funded for the most part. While dissent subsisted,9 English environmentalists—led by the RSPB—have since the 1990s rallied around the vision in terms of public good. RSPB Position Papers “We believe that in the short term a number of reforms will be necessary to meet the agreements reached in the GATT Uruguay Round and to enable the scheduled European enlargement to the East. We need a new contract which must be based on the principle that, in public policy terms, public money must only be paid for public goods. There can be no other justification for taxpayer support for agricultural policy. In order to halt their environmental, commercial, and budgetary damage, production subsidies should be gradually and selectively reduced.”10 “How Europe’s land is managed affects us all. Society requires land management to yield private goods, such as food, fiber and fuel, as well as public goods, which are goods that we all benefit from, such as clean water, healthy ecosystems, wildlife, thriving rural communities, and beautiful landscapes. Yet, as essentials as these benefits are, they are undervalued by the market, and, as a result, they are delivered at below optimum levels. The role of public intervention in land management must therefore be about securing these public benefits. This principle guides our vision and recommendations for the future of the Common agricultural policy (…).”11

A Detour by Brussels At the beginning of the 1990s, the marginal position occupied by English environmentalists within the national field of production of the farming policy led RSPB leaders to take their fight to Brussels. If the close ties between the NFU representatives and the agricultural civil servants were undergoing a first round of erosion, environmentalists had difficulty making their voice heard: neoconservative leaders aimed not so much at reforming the CAP which they abhorred, but to obtain maximum budgetary dividends, favoring the status quo

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(Delorme, 2004).In contrast, European environmental administration— which acquired the status of a Directorate-General in 1981—for its part sought out environmental organizations, encouraging them to set up units in Brussels (Dezalay, 2007). Seeking interlocutors, the officials responsible funded the operational expenses of environmentalist organizations which opened offices in Brussels. The RSPB then set up an office in 1993 via Birdlife International whose activities it funded. Nevertheless, for its leaders, this was only relatively helpful: DG Environment had a marginal position within EC when it came to managing the CAP, traditionally monopolized by DG Agriculture. It was with the latter that the real opportunity arose, surprising though it was. A conservative bastion, DG Agriculture had been experiencing since 1980 a reform movement. Once installed at the head of the EC in 1985, Jacques Delors—a representative of the liberal wing of the French Socialist Party, and a former Minister of the Economy under François Mitterrand—worked for a liberalization of the CAP, a reform perceived as necessary to deepen European construction (Fouilleux, 2003), which the French President was anxious to relaunch (Jobert & Théret, 1994). To do so the EC President promoted a renewal of DG Agriculture with the help of its new Director-General Guy Legras—an archetype of the “European énarques” (Mangenot, 1998), a top civil servant of the French Foreign Department specialized on economic issues close to the Socialist Party. Gradually the agricultural advisors of Jacques Delors were given the higher positions within DG Agri. Top civil servant educated at the ÉcolePolytechnique, former Head of the Agricultural unit of the French Finance department, Jean-Luc Demarty—who also was an agricultural adviser of Jacques Delors when he held the French Department of Finance and then when he held the presidency of the EC—became the DirectorGeneral of the DG Agri. Agricultural engineer, Ph.D. in economics, advisor of Jacques Delors and Guy Legras, Dirk Ahner took the head of the Unit 01, “Analyses and overall approach,” before becoming Deputy Director-General of DG Agriculture. Those reformists recruited young civil servants, such as Tomas Azcarate, Bruno Buffaria, and Martin Scheele: having educational experiences in economics, they earned their spurs in the Unit 01 before obtaining top posts within the DG Agriculture. In parallel the organization chart of DG Agri was reshaped: the Forward planning unit was directly attached to the Director-General; the sub-directorate for rural development became a directorate, as did that for

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market organization. This administrative avant-garde gave an immediate welcome to RSPB/Birdlife International representatives: Birdlife mounted a campaign in the mid-1990s. We came to see the decision-makers, in Brussels. There was, at DG Agriculture, the forecasting unit. You know, Martin Scheele, etc. They proved very receptive to the RSPB, to Birdlife. I believe that they completely shared our vision of the future CAP.12

The administrative avant-garde which had been working willy-nilly for the liberalization of the CAP since the end of the 1980s13 was in fact seeking interlocutors to bolster their positions within DG Agriculture: its opponents doubted the viability of this project, which was opposed by European farmers’ representatives—both those in the majority and those from the minority14 (Delorme, 2004; Fouilleux, 2003). Advancing under the banner of Birdlife International, RSPB leaders offered them the backing which up till then had been lacking. From this point onwards, Franz Fischler, Agriculture Commissioner from 1995 to 2004, was to systematically call upon the support of “civil society” to legitimize the liberalization of the CAP (Fouilleux, 2003): Agricultural policy must be accepted by society as a whole and not just by a few vested interests. In times of budget cutbacks and a slow economy it is doubly important to be able to show citizens in black and white that putting their taxes into agricultural policy is a safe investment. This is also why we need to continue to reform. Nothing would be more detrimental to farmers’ interests than losing public support.15

Prepared within the Unit 01, the officialization of the public good vision built on the agents who were closed to the IEEP. Asked by the Head of the Unit Dirk Ahner, Allan Buckwell quit the lecture halls of Wye College for one year to chair a working group with the objective of defining the outline of the future CAP. While they were of various nationalities, thus symbolizing the European dimension of the working group, its members had—except one people16 —educational background in agricultural and/or environmental economics. This was the case of Heino von Meyer (a German consultant and specialist in environmental economics), and José Viña Sumpsa (an Economics professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Madrid), both associated with the London Institute. When what since has become known as the “Buckwell report,17 ” which drafted a

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policy based on the concept of public good, the Unit 01 commissioned from the IEEP a new report18 this time with the aim of making specific the directions defined by the latter. Written by David Baldock, Janet Dwyer, and José Viña Sumpsa, this report was in preparation of the next CAP reform, which got underway in 2003 and which it aimed to lay the ground. The public good vision would guide CAP developments, although these proceeded in an incremental fashion (Ansaloni & Fouilleux, 2019). During the 2003 reform of the CAP the background was favorable, setting a sort of political opportunity structure. First, a large share of EU Commissioners—especially Romano Prodi, then president of the EC— wanted the share of the CAP reduced in the EU budget to allow eastern enlargement. Pascal Lamy, DG of Trade, also wanted a reform to take an offensive stance in the international commercial negotiations. Second, the last enlargement changed the balance of votes in the Agricultural council, Austria, Finland, and Sweden backed the public good vision then held by liberal trade countries (UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands). The so-called Fischler’s reform led to significant changes of the CAP. First, the legislation—by refining previous instruments—provided that environmental payments, rather than corrected environmental pollution, should reward the “services” farmers offered to society.19 Second, the budget dedicated to environmental payments was augmented, although admittedly falling short of that projected by the officials of the Unit 01. In 2005, in Europe, they represented 30% of the rural development budget, which amounted to 25% of the total budget of the CAP budget.20 Lastly, a flat-rate payment (decoupling a large share of support from production) has been introduced, paving the way for a subsequent increase of environmental services in the CAP budget. Consecrated by the European authorities, written into law, the public good vision was now endowed with an official seal: expressed through the words of official institutions, it enjoyed the universalizing attributes of which they were the custodians (Bourdieu, 2012). The actors who promoted this vision acquired a monopoly over the legitimate expression of this policy. Those opposing the CAP’s “return to the market”—previously stigmatized as backwardlooking because contravening international trade agreements—were now discredited by changes to the CAP which dictated a new line of conduct. The correspondence of the social attributes of those who held the public good vision in London and Brussels, but also the correspondence of their positions in the fields of production of the farming policy in which they

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evolved, allowed the circulation of the policy frame without its content being altered. At the start of the 2000s, in England, when the traditional agricultural alliance split, the European evolutions allowed those who held the public good vision to obtain a dominant position in the field of production of the farming policy.

A Reversal of National Hierarchies When the New Labor took power in 1997, a two-sided crisis hit agriculture (Delorme, 2004). Economic crisis on the one hand: farm incomes declined dramatically, because of the undervaluation of the pound against the euro, depreciating CAP subsidies. Health crisis of the other: in 1996, when the possible transmission of the disease to man was demonstrated, the “mad cow” scandal exploded, leading not only to the slaughter of millions of animals but also to an embargo on meat exports. As representatives of the urban classes, New Labor elites though came in power without project for agriculture (Ward & Lowe, 2007). This has been prepared within the Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU), a service reporting directly to the Cabinet Office set up by the Prime Minister in 1998 to enhance his capacity to do long-term thinking and strategic policy work (Faucher-King & Le Galès, 2007). At the beginning of the 1998 year, a rural team was initiated under the authority of the PIU Director Suma Chakrabarti—a state economist who before made his career at the Department of International Development and at the Treasury. In addition to PIU and Cabinet Office officials, the team included David Baldock, then Director-General of the IEEP, and leading scholars, such John Marsh (an agricultural economist at the University of Reading) and David Pearce (an environmental economist at the University of Oxford known as a pioneer of his sub-discipline). The report—which exhibited in its annex an economics précis for those who are unfamiliar with the concepts of “market,” “market failure,” “externality,” “private/public good”—enshrined the public good vision. According to its authors, farming policy (public policy in general) aims at facilitating “the development of dynamic and competitive rural economies—in particular through: a/Tackling the market and government failures that hamper rural economies; b/Encouraging the operation of market forces in the agriculture sector, tempered by action to ensure good and safe practice and the supply of public goods.”21 For a while the report remained a worthless piece of paper. It is the outbreak of a new health crisis—the

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foot and mouth disease—by the end of the year 2001 which favored the investment of the Prime Minister. Tony Blair and those close to him saw this crisis as an opportunity to attempt a political blow.22 The public good vision was a godsend to favor a sound reform of the farming policy which would bear the mark of an activist government. Tony Blair and those close to him did not hesitate to outflank the NFU representatives, farmers traditionally giving their voices to conservatives. Actually a sound reform of the farming policy could be used to deliver certain electoral commitments which the New Labor candidate had made of, in favor of both the European construction and sustainable development (Ward & Lowe, 200723 ). Great benefits were expected: the fondness of urban classes for nature and the countryside was considerable, as could be seen by the number of members of environmentalist organizations, the umbrella organization—The Wildlife and countryside link—claiming to have more than seven million members within England. Therefore, at the end of the year 2000, Tony Blair announced his wish to orchestrate a far-reaching reform of the national policy. A new report was commissioned by the Cabinet Office. In 2001 the Policy commission on farming and food was set up, equally made up of environmentalist representatives (the Heads of the RSPB, the National Trust and the Soil Association), food processing entrepreneurs and economists who had made a brilliant career in major firms (Shell, British Gas, British Airways). The exclusion of agricultural representatives is barely veiled by the person of the Policy commission chairman, Donald Curry: this farmer and owner of a food processing business, close to Tony Blair, had stormy relations with NFU representatives which had led him to leave the union. The core executive quickly enshrined the public good vision held by the Policy commission. In 2002, a government report took up this project on its own, relying on both the EC’s reform proposals and on those of the Policy commission. In his foreword, Tony Blair put forward: “we support the EuropeanCommission’sproposals for reformbasedaround (…) a shift in support awayfrom production subsidies towards agri-environment and the wider rural developmentmeasures. In the words of Curry ‘the guiding principle must be that public money should be used to pay for public goods that the public wants and needs’ ”.24 The report would trace out the lines of the future farming policy for England: the maximum amount permitted by the provisions of the CAP—some 500 million pounds—would be allocated to allow the delivery of public goods through environmental payments. The report

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also outlined the position the government would advocate latter in the European negotiations on the CAP. The Prime Minister’s investment shattered the traditional agricultural alliance. The first power relationship evolved dramatically in the national bureaucracy. In 2001 Tony Blair announced the demise of the Ministry Of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (MAFF), which was the only department to escape the wave of mergers creating “super-departments” during the 1960s and the 1970s. This had the effect of leaving MAFF behind, both for politicians and civil servants (Carmichael, 2006). No minister of Agriculture has ever become Prime Minister, and the serving minister has been near the very bottom of the Cabinet pecking order. As a consequence MAFF did not attract top-ranked civil servants for whom “super-departments” were seen as better springboard for their career. The ministry traditionally comprised a majority of specialists (vets especially), an undervalued profile in the light of the civil servant ideal of the “generalist,” who could offer advice in any field from accumulated knowledge (Bevir, Rhodes, 2003). In 2001 the setting up of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) caused the takeover on the farming policy of the administrative fractions surrounding the Department of Environment, Transports and the Regions (DETR) and its agencies, which was previously marginalized. For their part the (so-called) “old-MAFF people” were side-lined: while, since the 1980s, they had suffered from a reputation of clientelism, being accused—especially by environmentalists and agricultural economists—of being the puppets of NFU representatives, they were now stigmatized as incompetent because of their management of the epizootic outbreaks. The Prime Minister’s investment also favored a reorganization of the power relationships between agricultural and rural representatives, when the leaders of the Country and Land and Business Association (CLA)—the traditional allies of NFU spokesmen—committed themselves to a radical reform of the farming policy based on the public good vision. While the epizootic diseases experienced by English farming were penalizing their activities through the quota measures they entailed, this reorientation raised hopes of a new line of business, the delivering of public goods through environmental payments. All in all, when the EC and the Cabinet Office had announced their proposals, landowners’ representatives did not hesitate to turn their backs on NFU’ people, a defection that was concretized by the hiring of Allan Buckwell as Policy director. For its part, stigmatized as the architect of the “expansion era,” the NFU—traditionally run by large

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(intensive) croppers of East Anglia (Grant, 1995)—was then caught in an internal crisis because of field protests of livestock farmers criticizing the management of the foot and mouth disease (McConnell & Stark, 2006). The details of the environmental part of the farming policy had their origins in the report drafted by the Director and Head of the IEEP farming team for the Wildlife and Countryside Link,25 covertly funded by the RSPB. This stressed the need to link two types of contracts: the first is aimed at the countryside as a whole; its effectiveness should be assessed in the light of bird populations. The second was intended to preserve natural sites: its effectiveness should be measured in the light of their ecological condition. These recommendations would be incorporated in 2005 by the DEFRA officials responsible for drawing up the environmental part of farming policy. Henceforth the public good vision was enshrined in many official institutions—templates for action, indicators, procedures, and budgets. The future of farming, then endowed of the symbolic and practical forces of the law, was written. Those who earned their life with farming lost the power to define their own social identity. Remembering the making process of the report of the Policy commission chaired by Donald Curry, the then Policy Director of the NFU told us: No, there was no NFU representative in this commission as such. Well, the president, Donald Curry is a member of the NFU, say more or less member… Well, you know, nobody asked us our opinion, we did not appointed anyone. It was done without us.26

Conclusion This chapter showed that the rise of the environmental issue, a global problem par excellence, generated a major shift in English farming policy. From the viewpoint of this book, three main lessons may be drawn from this case study. First, our reading of the inflexion propelled by the New Labor government to farming policy highlighted the action of those—a set of environmental activists, consultants, and economists—who favored the making of a particular policy frame and its officialization, at the European and English scales. This “yo-yo trajectory” (Neveu, 2017) stemmed from intensive ideological work, redefining in neoliberal terms the relations between environmental problem and farming policy. A slogan summed

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up the issue: “public money for public goods.” That is to say that the farming policy should no longer support agricultural production (which supplies “private goods” already paid by the “market”) but rather the delivering of “environmental services” (which, as “market failures,” are not or are insufficiently compensated by the “market”). But, if framing activity (or ideological work) proved decisive, this case study has also showed that the success of those who promoted the policy frame in England and in Brussels did not depend solely on the quality of the frame they put forward. This point leads us to a second lesson. The structural reading suggested in this chapter shows that “ideas” cannot be analyzed without considering the social context(s) in which they are conveyed. Two lines of explanation enlighten the “yo-yo trajectory” of the policy frame concerned. The first relates to the high degree of fit between the social attributes of those who in England and in Brussels held the policy frame, while the second relates to the high degree of fit between their positions in the fields of production of the farming policy in which they were involved. Occupying previously marginal positions, the policy frame allowed those agents to weave new alliances, leading to a reversal of traditional hierarchies. In England investment in this policy area by the then Prime Minister led to a fundamental policy change, his prerogatives allowing him to blow away the traditional agricultural alliance. Enshrined in national law, the public good vision was expressed in official institutions—templates of actions, indicators, procedures—that favored the new public management of which England is the birth land. That bureaucratization strengthened the ownership of those who held and hold the public good vision. The new public management—the fertile ground of econocrats of whom educational and/or professional background in economics is the core characteristic (Davis, 2017)—constitutes the playing field of a game they monopolized. Thirdly, this case study shows how scale games—here encapsulated in the “yo-yo trajectory” expression—are decisive while studying global problems. The action of those who in England promoted the public good concept at Brussels favored deep change of the CAP. Their project echoed the orientations of an ascending fraction of civil servants at the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development at the European Commission (EC). A policy shift had already been initiated in this direction. This Europeanization of the policy frame paved the way for the policy inflexion in England. At the beginning of the 2000s, at a time when English agriculture experienced a new public health crisis, the New

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Labor government—the Cabinet office especially—adopted the public good vision, building the reform on those who favored its enshrinement in the European law. As a consequence the officialization of the policy frame buttressed the marginalization of agricultural representatives in the field of production of the farming policy. Side-lined as they were, farmers lost in England the power to define their own social identity, their professional future being written by urban-classed elites. In short, the “detour” by Brussels made by the promoters of the policy frame did favor the reversal of national hierarchies. In Europe, the policy frame still had to travel. Indeed, in member’s states, it gained unequal momentums, because of the webs of relations that structure national fields of production of the farming policy. In France, for instance, it has not been successful, because of the continuing emphasis put on agricultural production by dominant agents. In Brussels, new obstacles had to be overcome for the promoters of the public good vision (Ansaloni & Fouilleux, 2019). First, Eastern enlargement has changed the balance of votes in the Agricultural council. The accession of countries which have large farm populations has weakened the advocates of the public good vision. Second, the co-decision procedure, which included the European Parliament as co-legislator for the first time in the CAP reform 2013, has weakened the EC and favored the Agricultural Council of Ministers, which traditionally voices dominant agricultural interests. Lastly, Brexit would deprive the EC of the support of Birdlife International and of the European landowners’ association, two organizations strongly backed by their English counterparts. Nevertheless, reform after reform, the institutionalization of the public good vision has gained momentum, even if CAP reforms are still seen by environmental activists as merely green washing.

Notes 1. Donald Curry (2002), Farming and food. A sustainable future. A report of the commission on the future of farming, Cabinet office, pp. 17–8. 2. Because of European regulations, the rest of the farming budget goes mainly to acreage payments as compensation for the ending of guaranteed prices. 3. DEFRA/Treasury (2005), A vision for the common agricultural policy, London. 4. The “yo-yo” trajectory following the typology set up by Erik Neveu (2017).

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5. The book mainly consists on an inventory of the negative impacts of the farming policy (its “subsidies for destruction”) on the characters of the English countryside and natural environment. 6. Interview, former head of the RSPB farming team, former coordinator of Birdlife International’s ‘farming’ group, and former head of the IEEP’s farming policy team, Edinburgh, 2008. 7. http://ieep.eu/. Consulted in 2011. 8. The IEEP site lists 130 reports published between 1991 and 2000 on CAP environmental instruments, to which can be added 90 reports on nature conservation which discuss the farming question more or less directly. 9. These were not about the principle of the public good vision but about the definition of public goods. Some members defended a wide-ranging conception, including improving rural life: CPRE (1999), Funding the rural development regulation: Why modulation is good for farmers, London. 10. RSPB, The future of the common agricultural policy. Sandy, 1995, p. 9. 11. RSPB/Birdlife International, New challenges, new CAP. Sandy, 2005, p. 9. 12. Interview, former head of the RSPB farming team, former coordinator of Birdlife International’s “farming” group, and former head of the IEEP’s farming policy team, Edinburgh, 2008. 13. These officials originated the production of the 1985 EC Green Book which argued for a reorientation of the CAP toward the market. Rejected by the Ministers of Agriculture and farming representatives, and dividing the officials within the DG Agriculture, this guidance document was for a time side-lined. 14. That is the representatives of the COPA-COGECA, the leading organization that accompanied the establishment of the CAP, and their opponents from the Coordination ruraleeuropéenne, which gathers left-wing trade unions. 15. Press release, Brussels, 16 January 2003. http://europa.eu/rapid/pressrelease_IP-03-65_en.htm?locale=en. Accessed 7 August 2017. 16. Bertrand Hervieu, a French sociologist of the Centre national de la recherchescientifique attached to Sciences-po Paris: in 1994, the groupe de Seillac—a think-tank close to the Socialist Party led by Hervieu— published a manifesto with an explicit title: Pour une agriculture marchande et ménagère (Paris: Éditions de l’Aude). 17. A. Buckwell et al. (1997), Towards a common agricultural and rural policy for Europe, European Economy. Report and Studies, 5. 18. IEEP (2002), Environmental integration and the CAP. A report for the European commission, London. 19. EU regulation 1698/2005 on rural development. 20. European commission (2005), Agri-environmental measures, Brussels.

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21. PIU/Cabinet office (1999), Rural economies, London. 22. Interview, advisor of the Minister of Agriculture Jack Cunningham, London, 2008. 23. Leading rural geographers, Neil Ward and Philip Lowe were then close to top Labor representatives: the first was involved in the making of the PIU report, the second was an advisor of the then Minister of Agriculture Jack Cunningham. 24. Tony Blair (2002), The strategy for sustainable farming and food. Facing the future, London, DEFRA, p. 23. 25. IEEP (2001), Paying for the stewardship of the countryside. A Greenprint for the future of agri-environment schemes in England, London. 26. Interview, Policy Director, NFU, Stoneledge, 2008.

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Smith, M. J. (1990). The politics of agricultural support in Britain: The development of the agricultural policy community. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company Limited. Théret, B. (2003). Institutionnalismes et structuralismes: oppositions, substitutions ou affinités électives? Cahiers d’économie politique, 1(34): 51–78. Ward, N., & Lowe, P. (2007). Blairite modernisation and countryside policy. The Political Quarterly, 78(3), 412–421. Williams, R. (1977). Plaisantes perspectives. Invention du paysage et abolition du paysan. Actes de La Recherche En Sciences Sociales, 17–18, 29–36.

CHAPTER 13

Global by Nature? Three Dynamics in the Making of “Global Climate Change” Stefan C. Aykut

Introduction To most, the assertion that climate change is a “global” problem will almost sound like a tautology. Over the last decades, climate change has become the paradigmatic global problem. And unlike other environmental issues—air pollution, biodiversity loss, plastic waste—it is not a local concern whose proportions have grown over the years. The climate problem appeared as radically global, in its essence, from the start. A multilateral process with unprecedented participation and worldwide media attention has been established to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to warming impacts. And yet this globality is far from trivial or self-evident. Historians of science have shown that “the climate” emerged only recently as a global scientific category, replacing the study of regional “climates” (Locher & Fressoz, 2012). Moreover, social scientists have consistently questioned the existence of a “global community” with a common interest in fighting climate change (Yearley, 1996).

S. C. Aykut (B) Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS), Fakultät WiSo, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_13

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How, then, did climate change come to be almost universally accepted as a global problem? To answer this question, I draw on strands of social science scholarship that understand globalization not simply as a material phenomenon with social consequences, but as a process that is inherently social, political, and cultural from the outset. “Globalization is a political […] ideological and material project with a corresponding institutional infrastructure” writes Peter Newell (2012, p. 8) from a political economy perspective. This points to the cultural work necessary to constitute “global” actors and institutions. Similarly, political sociologists have highlighted the role of claims-making activities by issue advocates and social movements in the “globalization” of social problems (e.g., Neveu & Surdez in this volume). And scholars in science and technology studies have highlighted the role of scientists, expert bodies, and knowledge infrastructures in the “framing of particular features of nature or society as amenable to investigation, measurement, analysis, and response solely on a worldwide basis” (Miller, 2004, p. 82). Based on such perspectives, both “global warming” and the “global environment” have been analyzed as social constructs (Redclift & Benton, 1994), in the making of which scientific practices and organizations (Edwards, 2010), as well as NGOs and social movements (Yearley, 1996) have been central. Remarkably, however, it has often been left unclear in this literature, exactly in what sense environmental problems come to be considered as “global.” Studies on the iconic modern representation of globality, the picture of the Earth seen from space, show that there is not one, but several distinct and sometimes conflicting imaginaries of “the global” (Jasanoff, 2001), and different ways of constructing it technically and visually (Grevsmühl, 2016). Because this construction “always takes place somewhere” (Blok, 2010, p. 901), it is possible to examine not one, but a plurality of “situated” globalities (Ingold, 2000). The present chapter contributes to these debates by distinguishing three distinct ways of conceiving and constructing the “globality” of the climate problem. First, climate change is global in spatial scale. In the climate system, “everything is connected to everything else,” write climatologists Stephen Schneider and Lynne Mesirow (1976, p. 117). To understand it, we need to take into account a potentially infinite series of other elements and processes, from the water and carbon cycles, to oceanic currents, ocean-atmosphere interactions and ecosystem dynamics. The climate is inextricably interconnected, at a planetary scale.

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With this interconnectedness comes a second type of globality: geopolitical reach. Because carbon dioxide emissions do not stop at national borders, the climate issue has been framed as a “collective action problem” requiring an internationally coordinated political response. Third, climate policy is increasingly viewed as global in terms of thematic scope, as it links up to other policy domains, concerns all economic sectors, and requires the mobilization of all components of global society. This changes everything —the title of Naomi Klein’s (2014) essay neatly condenses this state of affairs. To really fight climate change, we may have to transform literally everything, from everyday routines and mobility practices, to energy systems and management routines, as well as to the regulation of global energy markets, trade, and finance. Each of the following chapters examines one of these dimensions of the “globality” of the climate problem. Based on archival material, ethnographic observation notes, interviews, and secondary literature assembled over more than a decade, I show that all three processes combine discursive work—the production of global frames —and relational work—the building of transnational networks . Despite these commonalities, however, the three processes exhibit important differences in terms of temporality, actors, and social dynamics. They also spur different forms of critique and resistance, as each of them corresponds to a distinct way of formulating the climate problem. Each draws attention to some aspects of the climate issue while concealing others, tends to privilege certain solutions over alternatives, and gives a greater voice to some actors while silencing others.

Spatial Scale: A Problem of Planetary Proportions In 1957, climatologist David Keeling began to continuously measure atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. The “Keeling curve” showing the inexorable growth of these concentrations has become one of the iconic images of climate change, and is generally considered the starting point of the contemporary climate debate. However, the possibility that human activities might cause “climatic” changes has been a topic of scientific enquiry and political debate for far longer. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was widespread concern about the impact of large-scale deforestation and land-use practices on climatic processes and rainfall patterns (Locher & Fressoz, 2012). The warming impact of fossil fuel

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combustion was also anticipated by a series of thinkers beginning in the nineteenth century. However, these were generally more interested in explaining past changes, especially ice ages, than in the impact of human activities. Moreover, “climates” were analysed by “descriptive climatology as a scientific discipline structured around the production and processing of reams of data that was mapped onto virtually immutable climatic regions with fixed contours and properties” (Locher & Fressoz, 2012, p. 592). This changed after World War II, when advances in measurement techniques and the global collection of atmospheric data, together with the development of numerical modeling, ushered in a new abstract definition of “the climate” as a world-spanning phenomenon (Nebecker, 1995). From that point on, the planetarization 1 of the climate issue would be driven by three interconnected dynamics: the development of ever more complex numerical models; the construction of a transnational knowledge infrastructure; and the work of transnational scientific networks or “epistemic communities” (Haas, 1992). Weather Prediction, Climatology, and the Development of General Circulation Models Climate modeling, along with numerical weather prediction, developed in the United States in the aftermath of World War II, thanks to new instruments (radar, satellites, telecommunication) and computing techniques (Dahan Dalmedico, 2001). John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician and a key figure in postwar American research, saw meteorology as an ideal domain for the application of the new computing machines: it poses nonlinear problems in fluid dynamics, requires massive computing power, and is of indisputable practical and strategic importance (Aspray, 1990). Moreover, the creation of high-altitude observation networks and telecommunications systems during the war meant that new data had become available. The Meteorological Project was launched at Princeton in 1946 on von Neumann’s initiative, in close connection with the development of a new supercomputer. Directed by Jules Charney, the team produced an operational weather forecast for the entire United States within less than a decade. However, it also became evident that improving weather prediction required a better understanding of general climatic mechanisms. In the early 1950s, scientists at Princeton therefore developed general circulation models (GCMs) to reproduce the mean properties of atmospheric

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movements. The U.S. Weather Bureau supported this research by creating a General Circulation Research Section (1955), which later became the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (in 1963). In the 1970s, climate modeling and weather modeling converged. Operational forecasting models, which had been regional and later hemispheric, became spherical, and could now reproduce global atmospheric circulation. Meanwhile, GCMs integrated new features, such as surface representations, which allowed them to make both long- and short-term predictions. In the following decades, ever more components were added. Models of atmosphere-ocean circulation (AOGCMs), for instance, simulate atmospheric dynamics and their interactions with oceans, seas, and ice and land surfaces. Even more complex, Earth system models (ESMs) explicitly represent the carbon cycle, i.e., the biogeochemical processes on the land and in the ocean that interact with the physical climate. Building a Transnational Knowledge Infrastructure In his book A Vast Machine, historian Paul Edwards (2010) analyzes the development of modern climatology. He describes the making of the associated global data infrastructure as a major technopolitical achievement, which, from the outset, combined scientific and political objectives. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) played a decisive role in this process. Founded in 1947, it became a specialized UN organization with intergovernmental status in 1951. The Cold War context deeply influenced its objectives, organizational form, and research policy (Miller, 2001). One of its main accomplishments was the creation of a global network of meteorological observatories. To realize this long-standing dream among meteorologists, the WMO did not rely on technical coordination alone. Political support was essential. At the time, the U.S. State Department saw the creation of international scientific institutions as a “soft power” instrument in the fight against communism. This was rooted in a specific conception of the role of science in modern societies, which assumes a strong- and positive-link between scientific development, economic growth, and social progress. Such conceptions also structured the work of the WMO. Hence, it was believed that scientific cooperation and the promotion of common conceptions of global problems, would help to harmonize national norms and enhance the chances for political cooperation.

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International cooperation on climate research further deepened in the following decades. In 1967, the WMO and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) created the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) to understand, observe, simulate, and predict the dynamics of the atmosphere. Two years later, ICSU established the SCOPE Committee to monitor the environment at the world level. And in 1979, the First GARP Global Experiment, an unprecedented enterprise of atmospheric observation over the course of several months, orchestrated the launch of hundreds of drifting buoys, balloons, boats, airplanes, satellites, and other devices around the world. Forging Epistemic Communities of Climate Experts In public debate, the 1970s marked a turning point. After the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and the publication of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report in 1972, the “global environment” came to be perceived as increasingly threatened and vulnerable (Buttel, Hawkins, & Power, 1990). Limits was based on an ambitious modeling endeavor that attempted to link social and environmental dynamics within an integrated framework. Later it would become the precursor of a new model-type: IAMs, or integrated assessment models (Taylor & Buttel, 1992). In parallel, the climate issue rose on the political agenda. Successive U.S. administrations requested reports on “the CO2 problem” from the American Academy of Sciences (Oreskes, Conway, & Shindell, 2008). Based on model simulations, climatologists’ predictions at that time converged around a mean warming of 2–3°C by 2050, with a possible polar amplification of 10–12°C. On the international level, the creation of the World Climate Research Program in 1980 (WCRP) further strengthened and deepened scientific cooperation. This in turn contributed to structuring a transnational community of climate modelers, which shared a set of scientific practices, but also a number of convictions, including a common concern about anthropogenic interference in the climate system, and a strong belief in the merits of international cooperation. Three conferences in Villach, Austria, in 1980, 1983, and 1985 brought this community together and propelled the climate issue into international prominence. They also launched the idea of a standing expert body, finally created three years

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later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. Climatologist Bert Bolin, a major figure in the GARP and SCOPE programs, became its first president. The mission of this singular assessment body of several hundred scientists would be to inform governments on the state of knowledge about climate change, its impacts, and policy options. Its assessments were to be “policy-relevant” without, however, being “policy-prescriptive.”2 The creators of the IPCC urged transparency in the assessment process, and argued that all of the world’s countries should be involved to the greatest possible extent. This strategy, together with participation in climate observation programs, ensured that governments could not easily dismiss the IPCC’s findings: virtually all nations were enrolled, first at the agency level, through weather services, and then, via the IPCC, at the executive and legislative levels as well. Linking governments to environmental governance by means of a global data-producing infrastructure has made it increasingly difficult for the former to ignore the latter. (Edwards, 2006, p. 250)

The IPCC also contributed to the formation of new transnational expert communities. Hence, integrated assessment models (IAMs) for instance have over the past decades become the main tool used to produce emissions scenarios for the IPCC’s third working group, concerned with climate mitigation. The “IAM community” progressively came to be structured around both a common normative commitment to produce “policy-relevant” knowledge and a shared “repertoire” of organizational forms, including a transnational research consortium, common scenario databases, and model intercomparison projects (Cointe, Cassen & Nadaï, 2019). This created a wider convergence of research practices and agendas among climate policy experts, while also assuring the IAM community a central role in policy advice. In sum, concentration on global atmospheric models to establish climate projections, and on integrated assessment models to assess policy options, constitute two facets of the “globalization” of climate change as a scientific object. Taken together, they also contributed to establishing the conception that “the global” is the appropriate scale for political responses to climate risk.

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Geopolitical Reach: A Problem of International Cooperation “The Earth is one but the world is not” (WCED, 1987, p. 1). The opening phrase of the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development—or “Brundtland commission”—expresses both an observation and a regret. While environmental pollutions, technological risks, material flows, and social relations do not stop at national borders, existing political institutions are still mostly based on nationstates. The report argues that these are inadequate for the effective treatment of global problems such as climate change, and advocates for the creation of multilateral institutions. While this framing builds on the process of planetarization described above, it also goes beyond that. It internationalizes the climate problem by constituting it as an issue that concerns all countries, and which can only be resolved by cooperation among them. To understand why and how this conception became dominant, it is necessary to examine another type of scientific globalism, which has its roots in the social and economic sciences. Research lines across several disciplines converged in the 1980s and 1990s on a call for multilateral institution-building to manage a new type of “global” problems created by growing economic and social integration among countries. This encouraged governments to support the creation of international organizations and gave legitimacy to the United Nations as the natural venue for such efforts. Constituting Global Governance as a Solution: Globalization, the Nation State, and the Logic of Collective Action This second type of scientific globalism crystallized, first, among political scientists and IR scholars. A common diagnosis across a large range of scholarship at the time was that economic globalization poses unprecedented challenges to the modern nation-state. The consequences were assessed in diverse ways. While some welcomed “the end of the nation state” (Ohmae, 1996) or proclaimed “the end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992), others bemoaned the “retreat of the state” (Strange, 1996), or speculated about its transformation (Jessop, 1995). In parallel, a new genre of IR research emerged at the interface between academia and policy advice. Centered on the study of “international regimes” (Krasner, 1983), “global governance” (Commission on Global Governance, 1995),

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“global civil society” (Lipschutz, 1992), and the like, it foregrounded the benefits of multilateral cooperation and transnational integration. These research lines did not simply reflect ongoing political developments; they also aimed at actively shaping them. Ulrich Beck’s seminal Risk Society (1986), for instance, identifies a crisis of the nation-state in the face of new transboundary risks. A decade later, his Cosmopolitan Manifesto (Beck, 1999) advocates for international cooperation and transnational activism as political strategies. A second line of scholarship, situated at the intersection of economics, IR, and international law, focused on problems of “collective action” and the provision of “global public (or common) goods.” Its origins lie in attempts to apply formal concepts from game theory to international processes. Developed at the RAND Corporation and Princeton University after WWII, game theory interprets social interactions as strategic games involving “rational,” that is, utility-maximizing, actors (Dahan, 2004). A prime example of its application to environmental problems is Garrett Hardin’s (1968) article The Tragedy of the Commons, which proposes a highly stylized model of a collective action problem. After Hardin, a burgeoning body of work developed more fine-grained models and applied them to a wide variety of social problems. A 1999 UNEP report with the programmatic title Global Public Goods synthesizes this literature, and also displays the UN’s interest in these approaches as an organization (Kaul, Grundberg, & Stern, 1999). Climate change quickly became the paradigmatic case of a collective action problem. Scholars converged in their preference for a multilateral policy response based on binding common rules and sanctions for noncompliance (Barrett, 1992). This paradigm profoundly influenced the debate on global climate governance. As Elinor Ostrom recalls, its applicability to the climate problem was “considered to be so obvious by many scholars that few questions have been raised about whether this is the best theoretical foundation for making real progress toward substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions” (Ostrom, 2009, p. 9). Putting Theory into Practice: Climate Change as a “Common Concern of Mankind” The Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in 1988 marked the beginning of a phase of intense diplomatic activity. The conference led to the establishment of an intergovernmental negotiation committee

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in view of drafting a framework convention for adoption at the 1992 Rio Conference (Bodansky, 1995). The same year, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that qualified climate change as a “common concern of mankind.”3 Subsequently reaffirmed in a series of declarations, resolutions, and reports, the concept opens the first paragraph of the Climate Convention. It frames climate change as a problem of international cooperation, to be addressed under the auspices of the United Nations. Hence, the IPCC argues in its first report that “climate change is a common concern of mankind, affects humanity as a whole, and should be approached within a global framework” (IPCC, 1990, p. 263). And the 1988 General Assembly Resolution proposes UNEP and the WMO as suitable fora for climate talks. The origins of the notion are explained by UNEP Executive Director Mustafa Tolba in a preparatory note for the Rio Conference (Tolba, 1991). On the one hand, he derives it from the concept of “common heritage of mankind” inscribed in the 1972 World Heritage Convention. On the other hand, he explicitly refers to the literature on collective action and global common goods. He includes climate change in a long list of transboundary problems that “proved to be difficult, if not impossible, to deal with on the basis of classic postulates of interstate reciprocity of advantages, state-to-state liability, and traditional legal standing” (Tolba, 1991, p. 238). To this, the UNEP head adds a second layer that echoes another popular topos in IR scholarship, foreshadowing the third dimension of “globality” discussed below. Climate change, he claims, is also a common concern in that it affects a wide range of stakeholders. Global governance should therefore mobilize more broadly, and directly address “all structures and sectors of the society” (Tolba, 1991, p. 239). Tolba was not the only UN official to engage in conceptual discussions on global cooperation. Indeed, the circulation of concepts between IR scholarship and international organizations during that period was facilitated by the permeability of these domains and the circulation of people across them. The editor of the aforementioned report on Global Public Goods, for instance, Professor Inge Kaul from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, previously served as the director of the UNDP Human Development Report Office and its Office of Development Studies. Hence, the discussions on the common concern of mankind’s concept are reflective of the ways in which the social and economic sciences were mobilized, as climate negotiations were getting started, as part of a broader endeavor to reform the international system. This aimed to

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replace the logics of national competition and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East-West confrontation, with the ideal of multilateral cooperation under UN leadership. From Rio to Copenhagen: The Rise and Fall of the Multilateral Approach The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, or “Earth Summit,” was hailed by observers as the opening of a new era of international cooperation (Grubb, Koch, Thomson, Munson, & Sullivan, 1993). The summit was a succession of superlatives: 172 countries were represented, with 117 heads of state or government, an all-time record at the time (Little, 1995). Moreover, close to 20,000 activists attended the parallel civil society summit, the Global Forum. The adoption of the UNFCCC—or Climate Convention—marked the establishment of the international climate regime. However, the negotiations on the treaty had also laid bare deep lines of conflict between countries (Bodansky, 2001). The most important division is arguably still that between developed and developing countries. In the run-up to the Rio conference, the former highlighted the importance of collective action in stabilizing global emissions, while the latter emphasized the uneven distribution of historical responsibilities and their right to development. The Climate Convention reflects these divisions. On the one hand, it is governed by a common objective to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (Art. 2). On the other, it includes a core principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (Art. 3 & 4), which introduces a sharp difference between countries in implementing the long-term objective. The Convention, which also established a process of annual meetings, the Conferences of the Parties (COPs), was further operationalized at COP3 in Japan in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol assigns emissions reductions targets to developed countries and economies in transition, to be attained by 2008–2012. The “globality” of the climate problem hence found a peculiar translation into UN climate governance, structuring the nascent climate regime along three broad axes (Aykut & Dahan, 2015): a common long-term objective to prevent “dangerous” climate change; a

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sharp distinction between countries in terms of responsibilities and obligations; and a strategy of “burden sharing” among developed countries to distribute the overall emission reduction load. However, this approach failed. It did so first in 2001, when U.S. President George W. Bush decided not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. It then failed again in 2009, when attempts to find a successor to the Protocol broke down spectacularly at COP15 in Copenhagen. Indeed, the illusion that a new multilateral world would rise from the ashes of the confrontation between East and West had already began to crumble in 1990, when Iraq attacked the little oil emirate of Kuwait and the United States decided to intervene. In the United States, the neoconservative current won the internal ideological battle and imposed its choices: the affirmation of American military power to protect U.S. interests, and a disdain for multilateralism. The war also sealed the U.S.’s new alliance with the Gulf countries, locking in American oil dependence and the unchanged pursuit of the “American way of life.” From George H. W. Bush, who declared in Rio that “the American way of life is not negotiable,” to his son George W., who warned ten years later that the Kyoto Protocol would force Americans to “walk to work,” the defense of a social and economic order based on cheap oil has consistently prevailed over climate concerns. Even the election of Barack Obama in 2008, which raised high hopes among climate activists and diplomats, did not fundamentally change the American negotiating stance. Instead, the minimalist “agreement” that came out of COP15 marked the beginning of a new era of climate governance, in which the refusal of the United States—and China—to take on binding commitments became the core principle of a new, “bottom-up” climate diplomacy.

Thematic Scope: A Problem of Coordination Across Societal Spheres and Policy Domains Historically, the construction of multilateral institutions to govern climate change followed the successful establishment of the international ozone regime. This contributed to the lasting treatment of climate change as an environmental pollution problem, which is manifest in the Kyoto Protocol’s governance approach. This approach was increasingly called into question in the aftermath of COP15. In a widely discussed report published shortly after the conference, British and American scientists and policy experts advocated for a “pragmatic” reorientation of

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global climate policy toward bottom-up and mini-lateral cooperation focused on win-win solutions and technological innovation (Prins et al., 2010). IR scholars forged new concepts such as “regime complex” and “fragmented,” “transnational,” or “polycentric governance,” to account for private climate action and climate-related initiatives “outside” the UNFCCC (Aykut, 2016 for an overview). And activists and think tanks called for breaking up the silos of global governance and extending climate concerns to, inter alia, energy governance (Lang, Wooders, & Kulovesi, 2010), financial regulation (Gore & Blood, 2013), and global trade policy (Brandi, Bruhn, & Lindenberg, 2015). The Power of Attraction of Climate Summits In sum, climate change came to be seen as a problem that intersects with and shapes other global problems and wider patterns of social and economic life. UN climate summits therefore became the focal point for a wide array of global debates and conflicts, attracting an increasingly diverse set of actors. COP21 in 2015, for instance, a “high stakes summit” aimed at adopting a new treaty, attracted 30,000 accredited participants in the official conference center at le Bourget, near Paris, while several hundred thousands more participated in demonstrations, conferences, and other events all over the city (Aykut, Foyer, & Morena, 2017). Indeed, depending on one’s role and perspective, climate summits can appear as negotiation marathons, where state representatives quarrel over diplomatic wordings; trade fairs, where think tanks and businesses present new ideas and market “green” technologies; or as popular happenings, which involve a diverse set of activities and participants scattered all over the host city. Like other “transnational mega-events” (Campbell, Corson, Gray, MacDonald, & Brosius, 2014), they are characterized by a specific spatiality, dramaturgy, and temporality (Death, 2011), and have contributed over the years “to the rise of a ‘climate community’ with its own codes, practices and language” (Foyer, Aykut, & Morena, 2017, p. 3). Other than this core community, however, COPs have also increasingly attracted new actors. These come to lobby for their concerns and connect with other actors, or simply to benefit from the symbolic and economic capital provided by the venue. Depending on their modes of participation—in the official “blue zone” where UN accreditation is required, in the adjacent business pavilions, or in one of the civil society spaces—they have to engage more or less thoroughly in processes

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of “translation” (Callon, 1986). These entail not only reframing their themes and interests in the terms of the climate debate but also building chains of support and alliances with other actors. Globalizing the Climate, Climatizing the World In this context, new subjects frequently first emerge at civil society events or in think tank reports, before making it onto the political agenda. To be included in climate talks, they usually have to be condensed into short wordings, or “inscriptions” (Aykut, 2017) that align with dominant frames in climate diplomacy, and gather a sufficiently broad alliance among stakeholders and state representatives. By virtue of this process, COPs have taken on an ever-growing number of issues and frames over the years: energy, development, finance, and agriculture, as well as indigenous rights, gender equality, and so on. The resulting dynamic can be described in terms of a broader “two-way shift” (Foyer et al., 2017): on the one hand, a “globalization of the climate problem,” whereby climate negotiations include more and more aspects of other policy domains; on the other, a “climatization of the world,” whereby actors in other governance venues come to frame their issues and interests through a “climatic lens.” Analytically distinct but not independent, these dynamics constitute two possible, yet opposite, responses to the imbroglio that is the fight against climate change. Neither necessarily results in a more effective policy response. As climate talks take on an increasingly diverse set of actors and issues, they may become overloaded, and increasingly difficult to handle. And as climate concerns disseminate into other arenas, they may well be diluted in the process, get “lost in translation,” or merely serve as symbolic references while remaining marginal in practice. Taken together, both dynamics are however indicative of the fact that the climate problem has acquired the power to aggregate a whole series of other social problems. Moreover‚ both contribute to a progressive extension of the domain of climate governance. As a myriad of actors and organizations orbit the climate governance arena, climate change increasingly becomes the frame of reference through which other issues and forms of global activism are mediated and hierarchized (see also Neff in this volume).

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The New Logic of Climate Governance: “Facilitating” Public and Private Climate Action The Paris Agreement adopted at COP21 recognizes this new state of affairs by replacing the formerly dominant “regulatory” model centered on national emissions reductions by what has been termed a “catalytic and facilitative” approach (Falkner, 2016). The new governance architecture combines voluntary policy pledges, a transparency mechanism, and regular review and resubmission cycles for states, while also encouraging private and sub-state actors to submit voluntary commitments. The UNFCCC is assigned an “orchestration” role, which consists in encouraging and providing institutional support for such efforts (Hale, 2016). This resulted in the creation of new instruments, such as the “Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action” website and the role of “High Level Climate Action Champion” assigned by the respective COP presidencies, aimed at sparking private-sector climate action. This reorientation of climate governance has been brought about by a broad alliance of philanthropic foundations, NGOs, think tanks, and progressive business associations with close links to climate policy circles in Europe and among the U.S. Democratic Party (Morena, 2016). Imagined on the back of the Copenhagen fiasco, the new governance approach takes into account the red lines of the two major emitters, China and the United States, and seeks to reinvigorate global climate governance on the strength of the “groundswell” of private and subnational climate initiatives. Indeed, despite—or because of—political stalemate, regional carbon markets, private compensation schemes, transnational city networks, and business-led standard-setting initiatives blossomed after Copenhagen (Bulkeley et al., 2014). A new agreement, it was argued, would have to encourage, multiply, and coordinate such initiatives, and thereby put pressure on governments to formulate more ambitious climate policies. As a result, the new climate governance is fundamentally promissory in nature (Aykut‚ Morena‚ & Foyer‚ 2020). It builds on the performative narrative of an ongoing “planetary transition” to a decarbonized world economy. Hence, the adoption of the Paris warming thresholds—“well below 2°C” and 1.5°C—is often presented as an unmistakable “signal” for firms and investors to reorient their economic activities. The narrative is further sustained by the ritualized invocation of the “Paris spirit” in high-profile meetings (e.g., the 2019 UN Global

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Climate Action Summit), communication efforts (e.g., corporate netzero emission strategies), and global campaigns (e.g., the #WereStillIn initiative initiated by billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg). In other words, climate governance is no longer considered by its main architects as a problem of environmental pollution to be solved mainly through multilateral cooperation. Instead, it represents a far more daunting task, which consists in reshaping worldwide economic and social activity by coordinating a myriad of loosely coupled public and private initiatives. The extension of the domain of climate governance— its thematic and sectorial “globalization”—but also its partial delegation to private actors and international bureaucrats, thereby become explicit political strategies. ∗ ∗ ∗ Climate change has become the emblem of a profound and irreversible ecological crisis facing global society. Some see it as a signature of the “Anthropocene,” a new geological era in which humanity has become a major driver of global biogeochemical processes, and in which we have to act as responsible stewards of the Earth (Crutzen, 2002). Others suggest that the only way to seriously confront the problem is to completely rethink our relationship to nature and progress, as well as the institutions of industrial modernity (Latour, 2015). While not all would go so far, there seems to be widespread acceptance of the fact that climate change is a problem of planetary proportions, which requires a globally coordinated policy response and profound societal transformations. In this chapter, I have tried to show that this understanding of the climate problem rests on a specific, historical process of construction, which involved three distinct but interdependent, partly successive dynamics. The first is a dynamic of planetarization through which “the climate” was constituted as a world-spanning object of scientific enquiry. The second is a dynamic of internationalization, in the course of which climate change was framed as a collective action problem that demands a multilateral policy response. The third is a dual dynamic of desectorialization—the thematic globalization of climate talks and the climatization of other policy debates—by virtue of which climate change came to be considered a cross-cutting policy problem that exceeds the remit of any particular international organization or national bureaucracy.

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What drives these dynamics? Other contributions in this volume highlight the role of specific claims-makers, such as states and international organizations (Katzarova and Neveu), national bureaucrats (Surdez), private companies (Cloteau), and transnational experts (Bernardin and Henry) in globalization processes. All of the above have also been important, albeit to different degrees‚ at different moments and in different ways‚ in the climate case. Climate scientists and scientific organizations were instrumental mostly in the planetarization of the climate issue during the first phase of problem construction and constitution. International organizations and states, but also IR scholars, social scientists, and economists, participated in the internationalization of the problem and the building of multilateral institutions. More recently, think tanks, NGOs, businesses, and philanthropic organizations have driven the desectorialization of climate politics. However, the example of climate change also shows that a focus on claims-making alone might not be enough to understand what makes problems “global.” The building of transnational knowledge infrastructures and the making of new scientific artifacts—numerical climate models—appear as crucial elements in the constitution of climate change as a planetary phenomenon. Both have also been instrumental in the transnational circulation of cognitive frames, and have contributed to a growing convergence among scientists, national publics, and policymakers on central features of the climate problem. U.N. summits also played an important part in the globalization of the climate problem. More than mere venues for interstate negotiations, they constitute “transnational mega-events” with their own, specific dynamics. Such summits attract new actors to climate governance, regulate the inclusion of new themes into climate talks, and diffuse new discourses and frames to transnational media audiences. It has been argued that the globalization of social problems can contribute to “invisibilizing” some issues or problem dimensions by shifting their treatment into confidential discussions among transnational experts and bureaucrats (Bernardin & Henry in this volume). Here, too, the climate case constitutes no exception. Since the early 1990s, the global problem frame inherited from the climate sciences has repeatedly been contested by voices from the global South. These have argued that the physicochemical reductionism of climate modeling tends to emphasize the universal characteristics of greenhouse gases, while erasing their local social meaning and the associated politics. “Subsistence emissions” from

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rice plantations and “luxury emissions” from SUV exhausts are treated in the same fashion (Agarwal & Narain‚ 1991). Numerical climate modeling thereby invisibilizes past responsibilities and naturalizes present inequalities and structures of domination. Other voices criticized the framing of climate change as an environmental pollution problem, arguing that this hides key structural causes for rising emissions, such as the global diffusion of consumerist, growth-centered, and extractivist modes of development. And yet it is also a specificity of global climate governance that it has consistently provided visibility to counterclaims and alternative framings. The UNFCCC has been comparatively inclusive in terms of civil society participation, and rather successful in generating consistently high levels of media attention. This has provided room for alternative frames and processes of repoliticization. However, while some aspects of the initial problem frame—e.g., the focus on emissions—have been more or less successfully challenged over the years in public debates, they remain strongly institutionalized in the international climate regime. While climate summits permit the expression of contesting voices, they also perform a “filter function” that protects the core of the regime. Moreover, the recent shift toward “polycentric” and “transnational” governance modes echoes a more general trend toward the delegation of political discussions to technical bodies or private governance structures. What the climate example shows, then, is the ambiguity of the “globalization” of social problems. Constructing climate change as a global problem has provided visibility and political attention to the issue, while also framing it in a specific way, and providing voice and influence to certain actors and solutions over others. It also shows that this process of construction is never monolithic or final; it is always preliminary and fragile, and can be challenged by novel assemblages of actors, discourses, artifacts, and infrastructures, which enact alternative ways of conceiving the “globality” of climate change. Acknowledgements Research funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG‚ German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2037 ‘CLICCS - Climate‚ Climatic Change‚ and Society’ – Project Number: 390683824‚ contribution to the Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) of Universität Hamburg.

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Notes 1. The notion points to a process through which the world increasingly comes to be understood as a physical body, which is limited and interconnected through geobiophysical cycles and chains of human-nature feedbacks (Reghezza-Zitt, 2015). 2. There is a large social science literature examining and analyzing the IPCC. For an overview, see Hulme and Mahony (2010). 3. Resolution 43/53 of the General Assembly of the United Nations, 1988.

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CHAPTER 14

How Do European Lobbyists Frame Global Environmental Problems? A Case Study of the Biofuels Lobbying Campaign Through the Lens of a Major Agroindustry Armèle Cloteau

For many industry representatives and European Union regulators, developing the biofuel policies was a long, intense, and unpredictable “saga.”1 Biofuels are fuels derived from agricultural plant products, such as rapeseed, maize, palm oil, and sugarcane, that are used in car and truck engines. From the 1990s, several governments on the European and American continents were involved in supporting their production, initially in order to counter rising fossil fuel prices, diversify energy supplies, and support farmers. The potential environmental benefits were at first considered mere side effects (Ponte & Daugbjerg, 2015). Indeed, it is claimed that biofuels protect the environment because the crops used to produce them remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through

A. Cloteau (B) Laboratoire PRINTEMPS, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Versailles, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_14

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photosynthesis and because they can reduce the use of fossil fuels. In the early 2000s, the European Union took ambitious public action to increase the continent’s energy autonomy, as well as create new outlets for crop producers affected by agricultural quotas and the renegotiated Common Agricultural Policy.2 In 2003, a European directive laid the foundations for a European biofuels market supported by significant production subsidies and tax exemptions.3 However, the consumption targets adopted in Brussels for these new fuels far exceeded the production capacities of industrialized countries. The literature on the construction of global problems is often focused on the role of states, international organizations, and transnational advocacy networks as the primary definers of emerging issues. Rather than studying the biofuel problem from the point of view of national or international institutions (Tosun & Biesenbender, 2015), this chapter highlights the importance of another, underrated set of actors: major transnational companies. Combining an ethnography of the work of a global company and a study of lobbying in Brussels, it investigates how an agri-food company that is highly dependent on vegetable raw materials took on the biofuel problem and how the company’s EU lobbyists managed to transform a transport and energy framework into an environmental one that best protected its interests. More broadly, this contribution aims to examine the role of global economic actors in the construction and shaping of global environmental problems. This dominant industrial player in the global agri-food market, the first of its sector to have biofuels on its agenda, will be referred to here as the “Welter Group.” Vegetable fats are the basis of all the everyday goods, including food, that the Group produces. While, as a consequence of colonial legacies, it used to grow a large part of its raw materials by investing directly in plantations in Africa and Southeast Asia, by the time the biofuel policies emerged, it was purchasing them on globalized markets. Alternative fuels, far from providing the company with a new market, could affect the price and availability of vegetable oils. Food is a strategic sector for the company, particularly in Europe, where it generates about a quarter of its turnover. However, it would prove very difficult to resist EU legislation that combined prospects for additional income in rural areas, energy self-sufficiency, and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.4 The study draws on over ten years’ worth of annotated working documents, position papers, working group reports, and other reports in the

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archive of the Welter Group’s European office (2002–2015). It is supplemented by twelve interviews with representatives from the industry and from environmental NGOs, as well as six interviews with members of the European Parliament or the European Commission who were active during the first decade of the policy. This case study is part of a larger project that led to an extended ethnography of lobbying in Brussels (Cloteau, 2019). A mechanistic view of lobbying would consider that the more legislation threatens a company’s strategic sectors, the quicker its representatives will engage in costly battles to oppose it. However, we show that the construction of an interest is not spontaneous, but results from internal power relations within a company or within an economic sector. This chapter presents empirical evidence to support Offerlé’s assumption that a collective interest does not exist until a group of actors tries to voice it (Offerlé, 1994). Just as within the EU industry federations (Laurens, 2018), we argue that industries build and defend their interests in reaction to how the institutions facing them frame the issues. The decision to launch a lobbying campaign is also indexed to the likely success of influencing legislation, and made in consultation with technical departments that can guarantee the scientific accuracy of the arguments deployed. We first seek to understand how European initiatives on alternative fuels disrupted the Welter Group’s economic model and how the company’s interest was built at the crossroads of already institutionalized global issues. While lobbying initially emphasized trade arguments, the campaign eventually took an environmental and social turn, opening the way to loose coalitions with “green” and international development NGOs. We then explain how company lobbyists adapted their campaign to best fit the European Union’s categories of action.

Building an Interest in Response to Legislation that Weakens the Company’s Production Model Because it takes several years to invest in, grow, and harvest oilseeds, a sudden increase in demand can impact price and availability of food materials. Having completely outsourced the production of its raw materials, the Welter Group was vulnerable to price increases, whether due to increased demand or reduced supply (from poor harvests, for example). European public policies promoting alternative fuels would therefore become a critical problem. However, neither this major company nor

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the food sector in general were involved when biofuels were first set on the agenda of EU institutions or when the first EU directive promoting biofuels was framed. In fact, it took several years for the company to construct the topic as a problem. A Company Left Out of the Initial Framing of the Biofuel Problem The first EU directive promoting biofuels, initiated by the DirectoratesGeneral for Transport, Energy, and Agriculture in 2003, laid the foundations for a European biofuel market. Unlike later directives, it did not impose binding objectives, yet the incentives created by production subsidies and tax exemptions nevertheless considerably disrupted the European vegetable oil market. Anticipating the restructuring of their sectors (Smith, 2010), some pressure groups were heavily involved in the initial regulatory discussions. Intensive farmers for whom alternative fuels presented a new opportunity, oil companies fearing competition from subsidized fuels, and the transport sector as the main sector being targeted put a lot of pressure on regulators. However, no employee of the European offices of agri-food companies or of their EU industry federations attended the first institutional meetings or public consultations. There may be several reasons for their absence. Like many of its competitors, the Welter Group was slowly moving from a decentralized and rather amateur interest representation to more professionalized lobbying activities. A small team of five trained lobbyists, occasionally supplemented by agencies and membership in multiple European industry federations, was created in the early 2000s for the sole purpose of lobbying Brussels. New recruits may not have had a complete understanding of the outlines of a company that was undergoing a major reorganization as a result of withdrawing from agricultural activities leading to plant closures and the takeover of international subsidiaries. In this economically sensitive context, the biofuels campaign was the new team’s first and longest campaign, and the opportunity to prove its worth to the members of EU institutions and the rest of the company. The lobbyists interviewed also pointed to another reason for the company’s slow uptake of the problem: the fact that the legislation seemed so far removed from their main products. Biofuels originated as part of transport policy and, as an agri-food company, “we don’t care much about European transport policies,” as one lobbyist put it.5

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This lobbyist, who later became head of an internal “task force on biofuels,” identified two flaws in the design of the biofuels policy: first, regulators did not consult with food manufacturers as they did with their counterparts in other sectors, and second, the Welter Group was slow to pick up on this topic compared to other topics and to become a “legitimate actor” in this area. Their first demand was to be involved in the relevant political discussions. My interlocutor insisted on the fact that the structure of the European Commission, in “siloes” by major public policy areas, made it possible to build relationships with officials in charge of the company’s industrial sector and to be on the inside track of legislation as it was being drafted. But this structure also kept them away from officials dealing with policies seemingly unrelated to their industrial activities, as was the case with the 2003 directive, which initially only concerned the use of biofuels in transport. The fact that “the company felt collectively concerned” only after the first legislative proposal had been written put the lobbyists at a serious disadvantage. Throughout the ensuing “lobbying campaign,” the European office team kept “playing catch-up.” Neither the Welter Group nor any other large food company set the biofuel problem on the EU agenda or anticipated the directive. The lobbyists’ first task was to construct an interest in the issue. Using Recognized Problems and International Reports to Persuade the Company Why did it take almost three years for biofuels to reach the top of the company’s agenda and become a lobbying matter? The archives of the Brussels office show that the subject was first raised in 2002. But the term “biofuels” was simply added to a long list of “rising topics” without further action. The same lobbyist remembered first perceiving the importance of the subject “intuitively.” “I knew we had to take it on and it was going to become the big issue. I felt like this topic would be a real coup.” After the 2003 directive, he spent more than a year collecting data, and, from 2005, he searched for a trigger that would make the Welter Group realize that biofuels would be a real problem. His awareness owed much to his background as trade advisor for the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, a role in which he had to deal with topics related to oilseeds, the raw material for biofuels. This former civil servant then became a “biofuel entrepreneur,” according to the definitions of a “cause entrepreneur” and

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a “public policy entrepreneur” (Cobb & Elder, 1972; Kingdon, 1984), within the company. He encouraged other departments to address the issue. When an update of the legislation began to be drafted, the Welter Group’s brand and management departments became involved. The new directive not only concerned rural development and Europe’s energy autonomy, but also included an explicit environmental objective to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and produce energy from so-called “sustainable” resources. The former civil servant and his European office colleagues began to criticize, within the company, the use of vegetable oils as biofuels. This negative internal campaign notably required translating European Commission jargon into words that fit the multinational’s categories. At the same time, the production of energy from corn that would compete with its food use was being much debated in the United States, so that members of the company’s supply departments were quick to agree that using agricultural raw materials to produce fuel could impact their price and availability for food production. The archives show that the entire European office then embarked on a strategy to “raise awareness” within other departments of the threat posed by the EU promotion of biofuels. Their strategy was to blend the new topic with three issues that were already the subject of concern in order to give it prominence. The first argument was the economic one: market distortions or even shortages would lead to higher prices for raw materials which would then weaken the firm’s competitiveness. The second argument was a health one: if the price of healthy vegetable fats increased, consumers would instead buy animal fats, considered less healthy. As obesity rose up the European agenda in the mid-2000s, the margarine world leader was keen to promote its products’ health benefits and affordable prices. The final argument was environmental: for the company, until the environmental benefits of biofuels in road transport were fully documented, it would be better to favor existing solutions (solar or wind energy). If this argument was the most successful in the long term, it was also the one that took the longest to establish because “science was lacking to back up [the company’s] position” (Meeting minutes, Brussels office archives, 2005). By placing biofuels at the intersection of several problems that were important to the Industrial Group, the small European office succeeded in getting attention (and resources) reallocated. For example, the company set up an internal “interdisciplinary task force on

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biofuels” at the end of 2005 that brought together professionals from R&D, brand, and communication departments. In parallel, the former civil servant turned lobbyist, now known as the company’s “Mr. Biofuels,” was promoted to a global public relations position. In addition to his EU duties, he got to represent the group, or even the sector as a whole, in international arenas. In 2006 alone, he was a member of two EU advisory committees (agriculture and oilseedprotein crops) and vice president of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the OECD. His new position enabled him to incorporate arguments from international studies, attract even more attention to the biofuel issue, and launch a lobbying campaign. As Neveu and Katzarova pointed out in Chapter 2, the universalization process based on organizations whose credibility is not discussed determined how the biofuel problem would be built. For example, the lobbyists quickly seized on the argument, developed in an OECD report from September 2004,6 against economic incentives for alternative fuels in several countries on the grounds that they distorted markets and led to long-term dependence on subsidies. Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) or the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) were also mentioned in the company’s interdepartmental meetings.7 Thus, in a constant scalejumping game (Faure & Muller, 2007), the members of the European office pieced together the potential dangers of EU support for plantbased fuels from international, national, and sometimes European reports. As the different scales of governance influenced each other,8 the firm’s European office attempted to slide into the gap between the European Commission’s expectations for biofuels and the likely effects of its policies (Jacobs & Weaver, 2015). By framing the biofuel problem at the crossroads of pre-existing global problems and importing arguments from other arenas to convince their peers to engage with their cause, the Brussels employees corresponded to a certain type of entrepreneur whom Henri Bergeron, Patrick Castel, and Etienne Nouguez (2013, p. 265) have called “entrepreneur-translators.” Being on the blurry boundary of several heterogeneous spheres enables these entrepreneurs to take advantage of discontinuities in the circulation of information, agents, and values. Indeed, benefiting from a virtuous circle of legitimation, the lobbying case continued to rise in the company’s priorities, with members of more departments joining the biofuels task force. There were “biofuels master classes,” internal notes, FAQs, and frequent videoconferences. However, the detailed reports of the biofuels

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task force show that the initial entrepreneurs in the Brussels office lost ownership of the problem when it became a company-wide one. Within the Group, the problem no longer belonged to a specific region, but became gradually globalized. Whereas initial briefs had discussed only European oil production and supply, as of 2006, the worldwide monitoring of biofuels and relevant legislative developments was coordinated from company headquarters. As the problem gained recognition and was handled by top management, the multiple framings mostly gave way to the trade ones. Presentations and briefing notes on the subject turned into a succession of alarming figures and graphs of possible production shortfalls and price increases. The first message on biofuels to be broadcast via the company’s general intranet was entitled “Trade and globalization issue.” Meanwhile, external lobbying activities of European institutions were really starting. By 2008, biofuels had become one of the company’s top six priorities for external communication activities, alongside counterfeiting and relationships with suppliers and distributors.

From an Economic Argument to an Environmental One: Countering EU Regulators on Their Own Ground Further strengthening the resources allocated to the problem, the task force on biofuels hired a consultant to help the Welter Group establish an “external communication plan for 2007–2008.” The company was the first in the agri-food sector to consider public policies promoting biofuels to be a lobbying issue and its interest representatives tried to build coalitions on the basis of its economic arguments. A Pioneer Company Acting to Preserve Low-Cost Vegetable Oils When the 2003 directive was revised and the European Commission held a public consultation in 2006, the task force prepared the Welter Group’s official opinion: – Biodiesel is eating our rapeseed oil crop. Palm oil and soybean oil will increasingly be used.

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– Rapeseed oil is the preferred oil for the food industry due to the low [level of trans-fatty acids] and nongenetically modified content. – Currently rapeseed oil provides 80% of the feedstock for biodiesel. Biodiesel provides 80% of the biofuel production. More than 60% of the biofuel in the EU is based on rapeseed oil. This is unbalanced and unsustainable (Brussels office archives, late 2006). In this contribution to the consultation, commercial considerations outweigh environmental ones, no doubt because members from supply and product departments outnumbered the three from the EU office in the task force (there were up to 13 members in the task force in 2007). After having persuaded the company, the task force also worked hard to create trans-sectorial coalitions to oppose the directive. As another lobbyist explained: I mean it gives you more strength to lobby with a whole economic sector simply because you broaden the base of your industry’s activities. When it comes to influencing a legal debate you have to put forward as much as possible your arguments to as many people as possible, so if you broaden your base and you take it away from just one company or just the margarine federation and take it more global, to the whole food industry, I mean you get more outreach towards politicians. This is simple logic. (Phone interview, May 2019)

Obtaining the support of the trade federations, to which the company paid expensive membership fees, was another way of increasing its resources, its workforce, and sometimes its technical mastery of the issues. However, it was still costly to take on a directive that, at least at first sight, met energy, environmental, and rural development objectives. In this configuration, strength was to be mainly found in numbers, as a representative of a Welter Group competitor underlined: “Between companies of the same sector, we cannot afford to have 50 different positions. Because you can imagine if 50 MEPs receive 50 different positions then they are likely to vote in 50 different ways. We needed a common industry position.”9 The task force’s trade outlook led members to reach out to other sectors, such as oil tankers, chemists, and pulp and paper producers, that might also be impacted by increased demand for oilseeds. Contacts were established in Brussels with several leaders of the oil industry who

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feared unfair competition from subsidized biofuel production. For several months, the Welter Group lobbyists tried hard to build a cross-industry coalition against the promotion of so-called renewable fuels. Although no common official position was ever reached, manufacturers nevertheless developed links and exchanged a great deal of information and contacts with EU institutions. The first part of the lobbying campaign had been focused on manufacturing and trading processes, so that its entry points were limited to very technical arenas (such as the European Committee for Standardization) and to the European Commission’s most commercial DirectoratesGeneral, such as Trade, Energy, or Agriculture. However, when the Directorate-General for Climate took over the new renewable energy directive and the European Parliament’s Environment Committee gave it considerable support, this first lobbying attempt failed. The lobbying campaign subsequently changed its angle of attack to social, health, and environmental arguments. The Social Shift of the Company’s Interest: “Something Positive to Oppose to the [EU] Commission” In late 2007 and 2008, the interests promoted by the Brussels lobbyists changed, for a number of reasons. An explicit aim of the new Renewable Energy Directive was to limit CO2 emissions, in line with the Kyoto Protocol for which the company had extensively communicated its support. How was it possible to tackle alternative fuels head-on in these circumstances? Moreover, in 2007, record food prices and hunger riots around the world had granted new legitimacy to the task force that had anticipated disruptions in the world market for food and energy raw materials. In combination, these changes opened up the prospect of forging new alliances, this time with NGOs. The minutes of task force meetings from this time focus on the company’s manufacturing processes and on global food disasters: the price of maize rising to a ten-year high in Mexico, for instance, or the hunger riots taking place in dozens of Global South countries. They also summarize international reports by institutions such as the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and IFPRI, and state, for example, that the price of staple foods will increase by a further 13% in 2010 and by a further 109% in 2020. The minutes clearly

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register the correlation in these reports between food price and food insecurity: every time the cost of food increases by 1%, 16 million people fall into food insecurity.10 These social considerations gradually overtook the economic definition of the problem that had essentially focused on the group’s concerns in terms of raw material supply. The main lobbyist involved remembered his relief: “This was an important step because we finally found something positive to oppose to the Commission.” This changed how the agro-industrial sector presented its industrial activities and interests. The company now positioned itself as supporting global food security by producing affordable consumer goods thanks to likewise affordable agricultural raw materials. By subsidizing the production of alternative fuels based on foodstuffs, the European Commission would be obstructing the Welter Group’s social enterprise. Even if commercial justifications did not disappear completely, the Brussels lobbyists’ social arguments allowed them to establish contacts with different European regulators and to seal new alliances, with other agro-industrial corporations in the first instance. Rallying others to a common industrial framework gave the Welter Group an opportunity to positively position itself, both singly and collectively with its competitors. This display of social arguments paved the way for joint action with solidarity and international development NGOs that had also taken up global food security issues and published reports during the 2008–2009 debates on hunger in the world.11 NGO and industry representatives met at panels on rising food prices in the European Parliament, shared information, and exchanged views. While this rapprochement concerned the agri-food industry in general, the Welter Group’s lobbyists were at the heart of it. Appearing alongside NGOs gave additional credit to the company’s position (Laurens, 2015). Commercial claims were progressively diluted until the Welter Group’s official position was universalized (Naurin, 2007). These social justifications were followed by a return to health arguments. The promotion of foods based on vegetable fats was approved by certain medical corporations and European patient or health federations, and supported by the Directorates-General in charge of health as part of the political framework on obesity. The Brussels lobbyists, helping to convert industrial interest into the general interest, sought support from food innovation departments: the increase in the cost of raw material would lead to a reduction of vegetable fat in food products. While

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the argument of food availability was highly individualistic when it came to saving one’s own raw materials, it took on a more collective consistency when it was carried by the entire sector, and came even closer to the general interest when, with the help of NGOs, it was turned into a plea for access to food for the world’s population. The company’s position was adapted for each meeting with European Commission members and then, in the next stages of the legislative process, with the European Parliament and Council. Following a strategy that Sell has called vertical forum shifting (2016), interest representatives favored both high-level meetings with the Commission, to which they sent their CEO or the President of the European market, and more technical meetings at lower levels of the institution. Thus, in late 2007, the lobbyists met with the heads of the Directorates-General for Energy, Agriculture, Enterprise, Research, and Health and Consumers. The task force’s reports indicate that “key members” of the Parliament were subsequently “approached” by spokespersons of the margarine industry federation, members of the Welter Group, and sometimes, in parallel, by NGO leaders. Member States were lobbied ahead of European Council meetings. The environmental arguments, which had been set aside while the company’s various departments bought into the problem, came back to the fore through contact with NGOs when Brussels accelerated its regulatory agenda.

When an Agro-Industrial Group Became an Ally of the Environment In order to reduce dependence on imported fuels and compensate for agricultural quotas introduced in response to international agreements, the European Commission had proposed providing financial support for the production of biofuels on unused agricultural land (called “set-aside land”) while incidentally cutting pollution through such crop production. But when the 2003 directive was revised just a few years after its introduction, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment became concerned about the low environmental contribution of these supposedly “green” fuels: due to the subsidized market, their raw materials were being grown not just on unused land but also in fields previously used for food production. Many studies and specialized organizations expressed skepticism about the directive’s ecological impact. One of the drafters

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of the directive said that its triple basis, on “energy, rural development, and environment,” was quickly undermined.12 The company fanned these controversies and used them as an additional resource to oppose to the regulator, while preserving its own image. NGO denunciation campaigns, a review of the company’s communication strategy in connection with the arrival of a new CEO, and the emerging controversies about the energy balance of biofuels reinforced the lobbying campaign’s symbolic shift. The trade dimension was set aside, leaving only the social, global health, and environmental dimensions of the argument. Manufactured goods were presented no longer as merely food produced from healthy vegetable oils that were accessible to as many people as possible, but as products designed by an environmentally aware company from “sustainable” raw materials certified by multi-stakeholder platforms. Our interlocutor from the DirectorateGeneral of Environment who took part in the drafting of the directive stated that his office was “invaded” by industrialists who had never been there before. He mentioned recurrent meetings with food manufacturers complaining about oilseed supply problems, as well as biofuel producers going “crazy” because they feared that their subsidies would be withdrawn or that sustainability criteria would be added. He concluded that he had never experienced such intense lobbying efforts.13 A large number of publications questioning the environmental benefits of the European policy promoting biofuels, most of which were made from food crops, appeared in 2008. The Brussels team incorporated their ideas into its own lobbying strategy, thus contributing to the circulation of third-party arguments. Taking advantage of disputes within and between EU institutions,14 the most frequently cited source after the FAO report15 was undoubtedly a report by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre that contradicted the very directive the European Commission had proposed.16 According to many of these scientific reports and articles, the benefits in terms of greenhouse gas emissions should be measured against other environmental criteria: biofuels produced from plant residues would reduce pollution while those from food crops would ultimately have a negative ecological balance. Rushing into the breach, the 2008 lobbying strategy gave a more central place to environmental arguments. The “entrepreneur” lobbyist was seconded from his position in global public relations to support the Brussels team. Being familiar with the topic and the Brussels microcosm, he pushed the company to join forces with environmental NGOs that

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only supported “sustainable” fuels, i.e., those not produced from food crops. The task force on biofuels and the interest representatives of various NGOs (Oxfam, Birdlife, Transport & Environment, and the European Environmental Bureau) developed a far more radical argument. When the impact of biofuels was analyzed “from cradle to grave”—from the field to their use in road transport—the limited reductions in greenhouse gas emissions were far outweighed by emissions due to deforestation, fires, wetland drainage, cropping practices, and soil carbon losses. As the controversy attracted media attention (Ponte, 2014), lobbyists incorporated this analysis into their arguments, as did the new CEO whose many public statements on the matter and on the company’s environmental practices were well received both by the leading financial press (the Financial Times for example) and at international forums (Davos, the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Convention on Climate Change, the United Nations).17 Lobbying activities followed the legislative procedure from the Commission to the European Parliament, which would, with the Council, be responsible for adopting the directive. European interest groups began producing a very large number of amendments for MEPs. Neither the food industry in general nor the Welter Group, in particular, were idle. The political adviser to the rapporteur for the directive went so far as to refer to an “outsourcing of the drafting of amendments by interest groups.”18 Alliances with NGOs made it possible to reach a wider institutional audience. If industry and NGO representatives sometimes met MEPs together, there was a division of labor: lobbyists focused more on Liberal political parties while NGO members used their contacts with the Green party. As agro-industrialists had feared, both the interim text and the final directive referred to a mandatory target for biofuel production and even increased it to 10% of total fuels used in the transport sector. However, two elements firmly supported by the company emerged in the European legislation: the mention of a rapid revision of the legislation and the inclusion of sustainability criteria in the measurement of the obligation to produce biofuels. The members of the European office and their allies welcomed these elements and shared them with a wide audience. Looking back, a lobbyist who had been closely involved retained the positive aspects: “We didn’t get it all but it was a big and nice campaign. We were at the forefront, we made connections with NGOs, we scored big time.”19 According to this account, one could almost believe that the

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European office’s priority had been preserving the image of a company concerned with the environment and the common good, rather than winning the political battle to maintain access to low-cost raw materials in sufficient quantities. The outcome was certainly not as satisfying from the latter point of view. Looking for allies could well be seen as a race to pool resources to approach the staff of EU institutions. However, the company did not form effective alliances until it had refined its position. For a time, alliances were envisaged on the basis of common economic interests, but, when the line of argument took a social and environmental turn, certain “prospects for alliance” had to be quietly dropped. The consultant that the task force had hired for a few months had suggested the European car, chemical, and petroleum industry federations, but these were eventually rejected in favor of the European federation of agro-industries, NGOs, and academic researchers, particularly in universities where the company subsidized research programs. While an alliance with oil companies did not fit with the green image that the lobbyists were trying to promote, it did not prevent company representatives from consulting with them in private.

Conclusion Several years later, a top lobbyist recalled the work of countering the European Commission with a “very powerful” social and environmental argument. While the company’s environmental approach appeared initially to be a risky gamble, it ultimately benefited its image. “We tried to be more Catholic than the Pope” the lobbyist concluded, to explain how they adapted their campaign to the Commission’s objectives. However, this progressive redefinition of the company’s interest required articulating the company’s contradictory aspirations first and then abandoning certain (trade and economic) arguments with certain groups and in certain arenas. In this respect, the European office positioned itself as responsible for harmonizing the message that the company conveyed in the various arenas where it was called upon to express its opinion. Although the office’s staff failed to establish themselves as the company’s only gateway to EU arenas, they nevertheless managed to take responsibility for most of the European legislative agenda on biofuels.

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Guided by their experience of the EU’s institutional machinery—which can be described as a European bureaucratic capital (Laurens, 2018)— the Welter Group’s interest representatives strove to develop an official and unified position on the company’s activities as environmentally and socially virtuous and to defend it during the most intense lobbying period from late 2007 to 2009. The battles over the construction of this positioning can be detected in the company’s position paper, but also in its external communication activities and in its search for acceptable allies. The positioning of any organization, whether public or private, is more a construction than a given, and the same applies to alliances between organizations. As was often said in the Brussels’s office during our ethnography, it was more profitable, easier, and more comfortable to develop a pro-environmental argument than stick to a pro-profit one when confronting EU officials, even when the first argument was merely a front for the second. Although the company did not set the biofuel problem on the agenda of EU institutions, by placing it at the crossroads of already recognized global problems, its interest representatives managed to create alliances both within and beyond the company. Playing one framing against another, they progressively constructed biofuels as a problem for this global agri-food company. While promoting the interests of their employer, they reframed biofuels as a global health, environmental, and social problem.

Notes 1. Interviews with key institutional members of the EU biofuel policy held in April 2019, in Brussels. 2. The 2000 Green Paper, Towards a European strategy for the security of energy supply [COM(2000)769], identified Europe’s structural weaknesses: rising energy consumption alongside increasing dependence on external sources of energy. 3. The European directive [2003/30/CE] called for the increase of biofuels’ market share to 2% by 2005 and 5.75% by 2020. See Berthelot (2008, p. 356). 4. Ponte (2014) has underlined that, during the emerging phase of the biofuel policies, “Agricultural lobbies (US corn, German rapeseed farmers), climate change activists seeking non-fossil fuel alternatives, and government departments concerned with energy and security

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provided a unique combination of interests that pushed biofuel-friendly policies in a generally favourable political environment” (p. 18). Interview held in May 2017. The following quotes are from the same meeting. OECD, Biomass and agriculture: Sustainability, markets and policies, Paris, 2004. Examples of frequently mentioned reports during the early years: Word data, Renewable global status report, 2006; IEA, World energy outlook, 2006; OECD, Agricultural market impacts of future growth in the production of biofuels, 2006; IFPRI, The world food situation: New driving forces & required actions, 2007. On the role of international institutions, notably the OECD and the World Bank (see Cling, Razafindrakoto, & Roubaud, 2011; Fouilleux, 2015; Porter & Webb, 2007). Interview with a senior public affairs employee from the main food competitor of the Welter Group, January 2018. IFPRI, High food prices: The what, who and how of proposed policy actions, 2008; World Bank, Double Jeopardy: Responding to high food and fuel prices, 2008; FAO, Soaring food prices, facts, perspectives, impacts and actions required, 2008. Oxfam, Another inconvenient truth, 2008; WWF, Plugged in. The end of the oil age, 2008. Interview held in April 2019. Interview held in April 2019. The three interviews with civil servants who were close to the drafting of the 2009 regulation all underscored the profound divisions between the European Commission’s various Directorates-General. Those divisions were also to be found within the European Parliament (Environment Committee vs. Committee on Industry, Research and Energy [ITRE]) and the European Council. FAO, Soaring food prices, facts, perspectives, impacts and actions required, 2008. Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Biofuels in the European context: Facts and uncertainties, 2008. Internal notes, Brussels office, 2008: “International organisations: Our contribution has been taken into account by the OECD, which has concluded in its report that biofuels policies have a distortive impact on prices. Furthers actions: FAO, World Business Council on sustainable development. Press echo: especially Financial Times is reporting regularly and critically on the subject, reflecting most parts of our position.” Interview held in April 2019. Interview held in May 2019.

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References Bergeron, H., Castel, P., & Nouguez, E. (2013). Éléments pour une sociologie de l’entrepreneur-frontière. Revue Française de Sociologie, 54(2), 263–302. Berthelot, J. (2008). Les causes de l’essor et de l’éclatement de la bulle des prix agricoles. Oléagineux, Corps Gras, Lipides, 15(6), 351–363. Cling, J.-P., Razafindrakoto, M., & Roubaud, F. (2011). La Banque mondiale, entre transformations et résilience. Critique Internationale, 53(4), 43–65. Cloteau, A., Lobbyiste européen: Processus de professionnalisation de la représentation d’intérêts à Bruxelles. Sociologie du travail, to be published. Cloteau, A. (2019). Produire la valeur politique des marchandises. La construction d’un lobbying agroindustriel à Bruxelles (1945–2018). (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Université Paris-Saclay, Cachan. Cobb, R., & Elder, C. (1972). Participation in American politics: The dynamics of agenda-building. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Culpepper, P. (2010). Quiet politics and business power: Corporate control in Europe and Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Faure, A., & Muller, P. (Eds.). (2007). Action publique et changements d’échelles: les nouvelles focales du politique. Paris: L’Harmattan. Fouilleux, E. (2015). Au-delà des États en action… La fabrique des politiques publiques globales. In L. Boussaguet, S. Jacquot, & P. Ravinet (Eds.), Une “French Touch” dans l’analyse des politiques publiques? (pp. 287–318). Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Jacobs, A., & Weaver, K. (2015). When policies undo themselves: Selfundermining feedback as a source of policy change. Governance, 28(4), 441–457. Kingdon, J. (1984). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies. New-York: Little, Brown. Laurens, S. (2015). Astroturfs et ONG de consommateurs téléguidées à Bruxelles. Quand le business se crée une légitimité “par en bas”. Critique Internationale, 67, 83–99. Laurens, S. (2018). Lobbyists and bureaucrats in Brussels: Capitalism’s brokers. London: Routledge. Naurin, D. (2007). Deliberation behind closed doors: Transparency and lobbying in the European Union. Colchester: ECPR Press. Offerlé, M. (1994). Sociologie des groupes d’intérêts. Paris: Montchrestien. Ponte, S. (2014). Roundtabling sustainability: Lessons from the biofuel industry. Geoforum, 54, 261–271. Ponte, S., & Daugbjerg, C. (2015). Biofuel sustainability and the formation of transnational hybrid governance. Environmental Politics, 24(1), 96–114. Porter, T., & Webb, M. (2007). The role of the OECD in the orchestration of global knowledge networks. Prepared for presentation at Canadian Political Science Association annual meetings. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

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Sell, S. (2016). TRIPS was never enough: Vertical forum shifting, FTAS, ACTA, and TTP. Journal of Intellectual Property Law, 18(2), 447. Sharman, A., & Holmes, J. (2010). Evidence-based policy or policy-based evidence gathering? Biofuels, the EU and the 10% target. Environmental Policy and Governance, 20(5), 309–321. Smith, J. (2010). Biofuels and the globalisation of risk: The biggest change in the North-South relationships since colonialism. London: Zed. Tosun, J., & Biesenbender, S. (Eds.). (2015). Energy policy making in the EU: Building the agenda. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Young, A. (2015). The European Union as a global regulator? Context and comparison. Journal of European Public Policy, 22(9), 1233–1252.

CHAPTER 15

Media, the Public Sphere, and the Globalization of Social Problems Daniel C. Hallin

The literatures on social problems and on agenda setting have always assigned a central role to the mass media (e.g., Hubbard, Defleur, & Defleur, 1975), going back at least to research by Fred Davis (1952) on crime waves. One of the most entertaining and enlightening texts ever on media as and social problems is a chapter in The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931, p. 285) called “I Make a Crime Wave”; Steffens was prominent American “muckraking” journalist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Steffens begins: Every now and then there occurs the phenomenon called a crime wave. New York has such waves periodically; other cities have them; and they sweep over the public and nearly drown the lawyers, judges, preachers and other leading citizens who feel they must explain these extraordinary outbreaks of lawlessness…the cure is more law, more arrests, swifter trials and harsher penalties… I enjoy crime waves. I made one once…; many reporters joined in the uplift of the rising tide of crime.

D. C. Hallin (B) Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1_15

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Steffens goes on to explain how the routines of journalism, as later media sociology would put it, produced a sudden increase in reporting about crime totally divorced from any change in its actual incidence, producing a major public issue in New York. The construction of crime as a social problem has been a major recurring subject of media studies to the present day. The media can be seen as an actor in the construction of social problems, selecting particular problems for attention, choosing frames to define those problems, and constructing them into narratives, driven by their own routines and objectives, including the central objective of attracting audiences. And it can also be seen as a part of the infrastructure, we could say, for the process of construction of social problems; like other institutional structures, media shape the environment within which other “claims-makers” involved in the process interact, helping to determine the “discursive opportunity structure,” to invoke two other key concepts used throughout this volume. I will focus attention in this chapter on the role of the media in the transnational construction of social problems, reflecting on some strands in the large literatures on such topics as international reporting, transnational news flows, and globalization of media and journalism. The extent to which mass media matters in the transnational construction of social problems does vary. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, that process takes place at many different scales and within different structural contexts. The concepts of agenda setting and of social problems both imply a process of construction of problems or issues as public concerns, which are shared and call for some kind of collective social responses. But the scope of the public involved can vary. A number of the studies in this volume deal with processes of construction of social problems that are carried out mainly by elite actors, interacting around policymaking processes that involve limited media attention. Media do doubt play some role, as elite or specialized media may cover such issues for attentive or issue publics (Krosnik, 1990; Krosnik & Telhami, 1995) which take special interest in them. As Briggs and Hallin (2016; see also Marchetti, 2010) show, for instance, specialist health journalists are integrated into the kinds of epistemic communities of scientists and public health advocates described in de Seze’s analysis of the definition of global public health issues, and the considerations those communities must take into account to define a health issue in a way that will give it visibility certainly include media-related criteria of newsworthiness. But the role of

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the media is very different in these cases than in the case of issues that are extensively covered for mass audiences—wars, natural disasters, epidemics, famines, and issues like immigration or global warming. Of course, there is a continuum between these different kinds of problems and of publics, and issues can shift between them.

Transnationalizing the Public Sphere? I’d like to start by invoking the concept of the public sphere, and reviewing the discussion that began roughly in the 1990s, about whether the public sphere, originally conceived by Habermas around the assumption that democracy took place within sovereign nation-states, was becoming, or needed to become, transnationalized. This discussion, which is also a focus of Roncarolo and Bentivegna’s and Aykut’s chapters in this volume, took place against the background of the expansion of global trade associated with neoliberalism, which seemed to be increasingly transnationalizing markets and producing other associated transnational flows which increased interdependence and also in key ways reduced the relevance and scope of action of democratic institutions rooted in the nation-state. Ulrich Beck’s work on globalization and the idea of a “global risk society” is often cited in this context, particularly his argument that the “power-play between territorially fixed political actors (government, parliament, unions) and non-territorial economic actors (representatives of capital, finance, trade)” produce a “political economics of uncertainty and risk” (1999, p. 11; see also Beck, 2006) which threatens citizens and which cannot be managed through nationally based democratic institutions. Fraser and Nash (2014) articulated one classic formulation of this argument (see also Wessler, Peters, Brüggemann, Kleinen-v.Königslöw, & Sifft, 1988). In Habermas’ formulation, Fraser argued, the public sphere is the arena in which public opinion is formed and becomes a political force that can give reality to democratic governance. There are two main criteria by which we would judge the adequacy of this deliberation process. One is its legitimacy, which has to do with access and participation, with the question of whether all those affected by political decisions have a voice. The other is its effectiveness, which has to do with whether public opinion, once formulated, can shape collective decisions that address the issues that affect citizens. Fraser and others have argued that globalization has undermined these conditions,

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first, by “driving a widening wedge between affectedness and political citizenship (30),” as people are increasingly affected by decisions in places where they have no voice; and, second, as globalization undermines the capacity of nation-states to take effective action on social problems. An important part of this argument is the idea that markets become globalized while political institutions do not, increasing power imbalances between common citizens and elite actors, often tied to business, who are able to act on a global scale. “If economic governance is in the hands of agencies that are not locatable in Westphalian space, she writes, how can it be made accountable to public opinion (23)?” This of course raises the question of whether media, which are central institutions of the public sphere and have traditionally been closely tied to national political institutions, have similarly lagged behind in the process of globalization, undermining their effectiveness in mobilizing politically effective public opinion. Many of the chapters in this volume underscore these issues, as they involve elite claims-makers working within specialized arenas of discussion to shape knowledge and policy. Thus Cloteau writes about how the Welter group’s lobbyists, in their effort to shape policy on biofuels, took advantage of the “siloed” nature of the European Commission “to establish privileged relations with certain officials in charge of the industrial sector to which the company belongs, and thus to be on the inside track…”. Bernardin and Henry, similarly, describe the way transnationalized industrial groups were able to influence the transnationalized process of production of expert knowledge, and hence to “privatize[e]… the very definition of traffic safety and occupational health at the international level.” Aykut similarly notes the ways in which the central role of climate modeling in policy discussions on climate change can “invisibilize” important elements of the social context of emissions, and marginalize the interests and points of view connected to those contexts. Two theoretical points are worth noting here at the outset. One is that institutions play a crucial role. This is a point that comes up over and over in the essays in this volume, the idea that “institutional relays,” as Neveu and Surdez express it, play a crucial role as focal points for the process of defining transnational issues. Thus Bernardin and Henry show that certain kinds of institutions, like the OECD, played central roles in producing knowledge about toxic exposure and industrial safety, and this fact shaped the definition of the issue. Kristensen similarly points to the role of the

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OECD, focusing attention on the importance of transnational indicators, which, in this case, promote transnational comparison of European educational systems, driving media and political attention across national contexts to particular conceptualizations of the social purposes of education. In Arnhold’s analysis of coverage of nuclear disasters, the role of nuclear safety agencies in providing authoritative information and framing the scope of the problem is central. The nature of these institutions shapes what kinds of claims-makers are likely to be able to participate, and also clearly affects the role of the media, as processes of news production have always been closely tied to institutions, which are often the basis for the organization of the journalistic division of labor of the “beat” system. Institutions provide both the authoritative information media need to produce news, and the focus on decision-making processes that is essential to defining newsworthiness. Second, there is some debate in the literature on transnationalization of the public sphere about where we should expect to find it. Couldry (2014), in particular, makes the argument that, although Fraser and many others seem to imply that we should be looking for a new level of public sphere that would transcend the nation-state, and would, presumably, include media which address audiences globally (Fraser refers to what seems obviously a problematic concept of “deterritorialized cyberspace),” it might be that we should think instead about the extent to which existing public spheres at the national and local level become transnationalized, rather than being transcended by new media institutions not tied to existing political communities. This presumably would involve changes in the practice of existing media institutions that would change the range of voices to which they were open, and transform their framing of social problems to take global interdependence into account. It would also imply a complex layering and interrelation of different levels of the public sphere and its institutions, and in that sense matches the focus on what Neveu and Surdez describe as “the interplay of scales at stake in the globalizing process.” Habermas’ theory of the public sphere is first of all a normative theory; Fraser approaches it from that angle, and her formulation helps to make clear the stakes involved in understanding the transnational process of forming public opinion. There are also a number of empirical questions that follow from this perspective, and I will focus here primarily on some of these, surveying some, though certainly not all of the existing literature, and pointing to some of the most important research issues. These

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questions include: To what extent have genuinely transnational media emerged, and what is their role in the formation of problems and agendas? How has the discursive opportunity structure changed at the global level? Which voices are able to flow transnationally, under what conditions?

Globalized Media Institutions? Important changes have clearly taken place in the global communication infrastructure that have made possible the development of new forms of transnational media institutions and new transnational flows of news and information. These include, most centrally, satellite television and the Internet. Have these developments, as Volkmer (2003) argued, “established a new ‘transnational’ political news sphere within a new transnational space – a ‘global’ news sphere which is not characterized by ‘sameness’ but by globalized diversity (11)”? Clearly they have created important new media institutions, audience patterns and information flows, and cultural forms which play important roles, at least at certain moments, in agenda formation and the definition of social problems at the global scale. Timothy Neff’s discussion of the global discourse on Twitter over the Paris Climate talks is one example. The phenomenon of the Live Aid concert, beginning with Live Aid in 1985, intended to raise funds for the African famine of that year, is another. I will come back to these types of global media event—represented by both the Paris talks and Live Aid—a bit later. (There is, by the way, a highly interesting documentary about global media coverage and global media events around that famine, Consuming Hunger [Ziv & Freke, 1987].) Internet trolls intervene in elections across the globe for both political and commercial motives. Traditional national news media, like The Guardian or Daily Mail, become available transnationally and begin to build important audiences beyond their original national boundaries. And real transnational news organizations have certainly developed; CNN, Al Jazeera, and other such satellite television organizations with transnational audiences and operations represented an historic change in the nature of the world communication system. Al Jazeera is one of the strongest examples, an institution that has had unquestionable impact on the formation of public opinion in the Arab world (Lynch, 2003). Here I would like to offer an illustration based on my own observations of war coverage in the United States over the years—though I would caution that these observations are not based on

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systematic research. In many ways, the US media coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seemed to me to follow patterns very similar to those of the Vietnam war (Hallin, 1986). There were some differences, however, including some that seem clearly connected both to Al Jazeera and to the rise of networked media. In the case of Vietnam there was very little coverage of South Vietnamese civilians, either of their opinions or their experiences. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, I think there was significantly more such coverage. Why? One factor was probably the fact that citizens themselves could document events on their cell-phones and spread the images through the Internet, including the results of airstrikes, which has in the past been one of the least covered realities of most wars. Another factor is probably the fact that Al Jazeera and other transnationalized media are there to cover civilian populations in the war zones. To some extent, this affects the US and other global media directly, as those media use footage from those news organizations, though as Wessler and Adolphson (2008) document, they fit that material into their own interpretive frameworks. But it also affects Western media indirectly. It was during these wars that “the Arab Street” emerged as a discursive construct, as an imagined transnational community that policymakers came to consider consequential (Zayani, 2008) and journalists, in part for that reason, came to consider as newsworthy, even if it might be represented in different ways depending on ideological assumptions. The idea of the “Arab Street” was very much a product of Al Jazeera and its competitors, and the patterns of audience attention and information flow they created. It is worth adding that there is some evidence that in general, reporters covering international news are more conscious today than in earlier eras about the need to represent local voices, avoid stereotypes, etc., (Bunce, Franks, & Paterson, 2016; Nottias, 2018), even if powerful biases in the global flow of information generally remain in place.

Limitations of Media Transnationalization The trend toward global transnational television began of course with CNN, and CNN was the focus on much of the early discussion of the effect of transnationalized media on political agendas. In the 1990s when international interventions took place in Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans, and Rwanda, it became common to talk about the “CNN effect.” The argument was that these “humanitarian interventions” were driven by the

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global circulation of television images of suffering civilians, which forced policymakers to act in ways they would not otherwise have done. This was seen as evidence of a powerful new form of mediatization of foreign policy, in which logics of media attention and the resulting mobilizations of public opinion across borders displaced the traditional realist logics of international relations. Research on the subject showed mixed results, however, and suggested that there were important limits to this effect. The most systematic study by Robinson (2002) showed that the circulation of media images could under certain circumstances drive such interventions, depending both on the kind of media framing—whether it was empathetic or distancing—and on political factors, including the costliness of the intervention and the degree of policy uncertainty among elites. But many of the cases typically cited as examples of the CNN effect turned out to be better explained by more traditional decision-making processes. In general, the vision of a news media and communication infrastructure transforming the processes of agenda formation needs to be heavily qualified. Cultural industries are substantially transnationalized, but news media are transnationalized to a much lesser extent. Consistent with the greater ease with which elites participate in global decision-making generally, the strongest examples with some exceptions are business-oriented media like the Financial Times or Bloomberg. The organizations that deliver news to most of the mass public worldwide remain nationally based. We know less about transnational circulation of political information online, but it seems likely that national borders still deeply affect that circulation. In terms of media content, there is a substantial literature documenting the “domestication” of transnational news and issues in national news coverage (Clausen, 2004; DeVreese, 2001). Both Arnhold’s analysis of news coverage of nuclear disasters and Ansaloni’s analysis of the “mad Cow” case confirm the deep impact of national political contexts on the framing of social problems, and Roncarolo and Bentivegna find it also in the twitter discussion of the Italian referendum, despite the technical capacity of social media to facilitate dialogue across national borders. Many studies similarly show the strong tendency of national media around the world to reflect particular national perspectives, often tied to government policy, on international conflicts like the Iraq war (e.g., Kolmer & Semetko, 2009). Of course, we live in an age when nationalism is resurgent in much of the world, and visions of cosmopolitan global solidarity are far from ascendant. It is important to

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qualify the point about domestication of international news, however, consistent with Couldry’s point about the multilayered character of a global public sphere, by saying that not all forms of domestication are incompatible with some form of development of transnational public opinion. Olausson (2014), for example, in an analysis of reporting of the worldwide Earth Hour campaign in Sweden, the United States and India, found different kinds of domestication, some of which linked local events to the global context of the event, and some of which separated them. She also did find some patterns of deterritorialization of the event.

Transnational Cooperative Journalism and Global Media Events I would like to close by looking at two further examples of forms of transnational media involvement in the formation of agendas and opinions on global issues, each of which is significant and each of which also has limitations in its capacity to shape policy and opinion. Both are examples of relatively active media involvement. The first is the growing phenomenon of transnational journalistic collaboration. This is probably best illustrated by the cases of the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers (Berglez & Gearing, 2018), investigative reports that focused attention on the ability of elites to use offshore banking to conceal income and evade taxes. The Panama Papers story began with a massive leak of documents to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It was preceded by earlier such leaks to Wikileaks, which then collaborated with mainstream news organizations to package the material for mass audiences and legitimate it as political news. In this case, the Süddeutsche Zeitung worked through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to assemble a collaboration of nearly 400 journalists in eighty countries, which then broke the story simultaneously in media across the world to maximize its impact. The Columbia Journalism Review (Uberti, 2016) wrote, The project is a testament to ICIJ’s partnership model, which aims to maximize impact through inclusive global collaboration. Media partners around the world localized the Panama Papers for their respective audiences, while near-simultaneous publication of that work created a critical mass of coverage needed to drive discussion worldwide. Such joint efforts are

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also more resilient to government or corporate pushback in any particular country.

This model was repeated later with the Paradise papers. Again the Columbia Journalism Review wrote (Allsop, 2017): The Paradise Papers are proof of a repeatable model: Disgruntled employees of offshoring firms know with greater certainty that they can anonymously leak data to reporters who will sieve it and translate it into public-interest journalism.

Helft, Alfter, and Pfetsch (2019) give other examples within the European context, including collaborations dealing with farm subsidies, immigrant deaths, and the role of Luxembourg as a tax haven. Berglez (2013) and Cottle (2009) have both made broad arguments about trends toward the development of “global journalism.” This kind of journalistic collaboration has its limits. Investigative journalism is hard work and a leak like this is a rare event; journalists cannot keep the issue of offshore tax havens and transnational banking regulation continuously on the public agenda. Here again we see the importance of institutions, which must pay attention to an issue to put it on the agenda continuously. But it is certainly a strong case of active media involvement in bringing an issue into public discussion. The second example is global media events. I first became interested in the idea of a global public sphere in the 1980s, when the global movement for nuclear arms control was underway. That movement built on visions of global civil society and cosmopolitan citizenship that had developed in part around the ratification of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, which was widely seen as something that was not merely an intergovernmental agreement, but was addressed in some sense to people in general without regard to their citizenship. The nuclear arms race was a perfect example of global interdependencency, as the actions of the US and Soviet governments could affect the lives of citizens around the world. National security policy, however, has historically been very difficult for civil society or ordinary citizens to influence, even within single, democratic nationstates. In the 1980s, however, strong public attention to the issue of arms control did arise at certain times. Among those occasions were the three summit meetings that took place between US President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev in 1985, 1987, and 1988. Large numbers of

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activists of various sorts from around the world convened in the locations where these meetings were held, and the summits were huge media events (in the sense of Katz & Dayan, 1992; see also Couldry, Hepp & Krotz, 2010), which, as Hallin and Mancini (1991, 1992) argue in our analysis of the United States, Italian and Soviet coverage of the event, ritually invoked a global “we,” a global community of ordinary citizens who were watching and who had a stake in the outcome of the process the two states were engaged in. This audience, both in the form of the activists present at the event and of those following from afar, was an important part of the television representation. This invocation of global community had its limitations, including a strong presumption that ultimately it was up to the two superpower leaders to solve the problem, that only they could really act, while global civil society could only watch. Nevertheless, these kinds of media events unquestionably elevated the salience of arms control as an issue and broadened its framing beyond the traditional realist, national interest paradigm. These kinds of media events take a number of different forms, and are significant in many contexts. Some, like this one, involve popular and civil society mobilizations connected to transnational meeting between states. The Paris Climate talks, discussed in Neff’s chapter, would be an example of this model. Some are primarily civil society initiatives. This was true of many arms control mobilizations in the 1980s, or an event like the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, or the global climate strike in 2019. And some center around popular culture, and draw on the globalized character of cultural industries, and the role of celebrities as noninstitutional actors who are nevertheless public figures considered newsworthy by the media to shape the agenda. Media logics are clearly crucial to the success of these kinds of events in generating mass attention, including the logic of personalization, which usually focuses on world leaders, but also, for example, built publicity around the figure of Greta Thunberg. This is another example of transnational agenda setting in which the media play a central and relatively active role, as do civil society organizations. Like global investigative journalism, of course, it too has its limits, as it is difficult to sustain attention beyond the extraordinary moment of a participatory media event without institutional follow-up.

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Conclusion Media have always played a central role in agenda setting and in the construction of social problems, though their role does vary from one type of issue to another: some agendas are set by relatively small sets of actors working out of the view of the mass public, others are set in processes in which broad mass publics and the media that address them to play a central role. Media, are, to note a phrase used by Aykut in this volume, crucial to “the cultural work necessary to constitute ‘global’ actors and institutions.” Most news media, however, have historically been based in the nation-state, and with some exceptions most remain so today, particularly those that reach the widest audiences. Popular culture is more globalized, but its role in the construction of political issues and social problems is more sporadic. Processes of opinion-formation have always taken place across national borders nevertheless, of course, and media have always, at times, promoted visions of transnational or cosmopolitan citizenship. But this fact about the structure of media institutions—which of course is rooted in their relationship with the political institutions of the nation-state, does raise important questions about the ability of nationally based political institutions to respond to social problems on a global scale, and about the nature and the legitimacy of the public sphere in a world of increased transnational interdependence, and one in which some actors can move, communicate, and act at a global scale much more easily than others. There are, as we have seen, different views about what kinds of changes would be necessary to resolve these kinds of issues—whether media institutions would themselves have to become global, or could remain national, but work in more globalized ways. In any case, a number of key research questions follow from this question about the public sphere and global social problems. To what extent have transnational media institutions evolved, and what is their role in the process of forming opinion and policy? How have the practices of journalism changed, over time, and how does this affect the flow of information and opinion across borders, the roles of different kinds of actors, and the framing of issues of global concern? What about other media forms, including those of popular culture, what roles do they play in relation to global issues? And what about social media; the platforms are global, but what actual patterns of use and interaction exist in relation to global issues?

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Author Index

A Aalberg, Toril, 143, 148 Abbott, Kenneth, 36 Abel, Richard, 9 Abou-Chadi, Tarik, 78, 81 Adam, Silke, 144 Adams, James, 242 Adolphsen, Manuel, 327 Agarwal, Anil, 294 Ahmed, Khaled, 54 Aklin, Michael, 164 Alam, Thomas, 225 Aleem, Zeeshan, 180 Alfter, Brigitte, 330 Alsop, John, 330 Altheide, David, 101 Andonova, Liliana, 291 Andreas, Peter, 29 Ansaloni, Matthieu, 9, 12, 328 Ansart, Jessica, 30 Ansell, Ben, 242 Arndt, Christiane, 235 Arnhold, Valérie, 7, 10, 17, 40, 78, 117, 130, 325, 328

Aspray, William, 280 Axelrod, Regina, 129 Aykut, Stefan, 6, 12, 19, 164, 166, 168, 175, 176, 287, 289, 290, 323, 324, 332 B Bachrach, Peter, 73 Badie, Bertrand, 20 Baisnée, Olivier, 100, 156 Bakker, Ryan, 242 Baldock, David, 260–262, 266, 267 Ballmann, Katja, 145 Bandura, Romina, 231, 234 Bara, Judith, 241 Baratz, Morton, 73 Barkin, Samuel, 31, 34 Barrett, Scott, 285 Bartholomé, Guus, 146 Bartley, Tim, 6, 36, 39, 40 Bauchowitz, Stefan, 142 Baumgartner, Frank, 8, 16, 17, 40, 74–76, 79, 97, 234 Bayer, Ronald, 54, 65

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1

337

338

AUTHOR INDEX

Beck-Nielsen, Søren, 211 Beck, Ulrich, 285, 323 Benabou, Sarah, 175, 177, 179 Benamouzig, Daniel, 214 Benkler, Yochai, 166 Benson, Rod, 14, 74, 89, 100, 112 Bentivegna, Sara, 10, 11, 323, 328 Benton, Ted, 278 Beramendi, Pablo, 237 Bergeron, Henri, 307 Berglez, Peter, 329, 330 Berild, Dag, 226 Berlan, David, 50 Bernardi, Luca, 79 Bernardin, Steve, 6, 10, 189, 196, 213, 293, 324 Berten, John, 8 Best, Joel, 5, 8, 14, 15, 163, 166, 167, 175, 177 Best, Rachel, 41, 127 Betsill, Michel, 291 Bevan, Shaun, 75, 84 Bevir, Mark, 269 Bezes, Philippe, 214 Bieber, Tonia, 232, 237, 238 Biesenbender, Sophie, 302 Bijsmans, Patrick, 144 Birkland, Thomas, 78 Bishof, Daniel, 79 Blair, Tony, 255, 256, 274 Blanchard, Olivier, 33 Blanchard, Philippe, 120 Blei, David, 149 Blok, Anders, 278 Blood, David, 289 Blumer, Herbert, 212 Bodansky, Daniel, 286, 287 Bogard, Cynthia, 14, 213, 217 Bogdanov, Petko, 157 Böhmelt, Tobias, 84 Boltanski, Luc, 258 Bonafont-Chaques, Laura, 75

Bond, Christopher, 49 Boomgaarden, Hajo, 142 Bordignon, Fabio, 146 Bosk, Charles, 50, 99, 100 Boudia, Soraya, 117, 188, 193, 213 Bourdieu, Pierre, 37, 96, 100, 107, 109, 111, 132, 258, 266 Bourrier, Mathilde, 215 Boussaguet, Laurie, 17 Bowers, John, 260, 261 Boyd, Danah, 165 Boykoff, Maxwell, 164, 166 Brandi, Clara, 289 Braun, Dietmar, 41 Breeman, Gerard, 76, 89 Brender, Nathalie, 215 Breunig, Christian, 8, 97 Briggs, Charles, 322 Bromley, David, 14, 262 Brosius, Peter, 289 Brouard, Sylvain, 17, 120 Brown, Theodore, 49 Brüggemann, Michael, 138, 323 Bruhn, Dominique, 289 Bruns, Axel, 165 Buckwell, Alan, 260, 262, 265, 269 Budge, Ian, 232–234, 241 Bud, Robert, 226 Buell, Emmett, 81 Bulkeley, Harriet, 291 Bunce, Mel, 327 Burgess, Jean, 165 Burgos-Vigna, Diana, 8 Burton-Jeangros, Claudine, 215 Buse, Kent, 49 Büthe, Tim, 28 Butler, David, 138 Buttel, Frederick, 282

C Cacciatore, Michael A., 143

AUTHOR INDEX

Callon, Michel, 290 Cameron, Edward, 177, 179 Cammaerts, Bart, 139, 142 Campana, Aurélie, 258 Campbell, Lisa, 289 Carmichael, Nigel, 269 Carmines, Edward, 232 Carpenter, Daniel, 119 Carvalho, Annabella, 164 Cassen, Christophe, 283 Castells, Manuel, 142, 165 Castel, Patrick, 307 Ceccarini, Luigi, 146 Chabrol, Fanny, 52, 54 Chadwick, Andrew, 141 Chalaby, Jean, 138 Champagne, Patrick, 106, 107, 132 Chaqués, Laura, 17 Cherian, Thomas, 52 Cheshire, Paul, 260, 261 Chirac, Jacques, 126 Cîrstocea, Iona, 42 Clark, Meredith, 167 Clausen, Lisbeth, 137, 328 Cling, Jean-Pierrre, 317 Cloteau, Armèlle, 11, 12, 19, 188, 293, 303, 324 Cobb, Roger, 3, 75, 79, 97, 306 Cointe, Béatrice, 283 Colman, David, 260 Comby, Jean-Baptiste, 164, 189 Compagnon, Daniel, 291 Conway, Erik, 282 Cook, Fay Lomax, 97 Cook, Timothy, 97, 112 Corn, Jacqueline, 193, 197 Corson, Catherine, 289 Cottle, Simon, 330 Couldry, Nick, 101, 325, 329, 331 Craddock, Suzan, 212 Creager, Angela, 193 Crutzen, Paul, 292

339

Cueto, Marcos, 49 Culpepper, Pepper, 40, 188, 189 Curran, James, 142 Curry, Donald, 255, 256, 268, 270

D Dahan-Dalmedico, Amy, 280, 285, 287 Dahl, Robert, 34 Dale, Roger, 37 Dalton, Russell, 232 Daunton, Martin, 6 David, Pierre-Marie, 49 Davis, Aeron, 98, 101, 107, 258, 271 Davis, Fred, 321 Davis, Kathy, 15 Davis, Kevin, 231, 233, 234 Dayan, Daniel, 331 Death, Carl, 289 Debons, Jérome, 228 Defleur, Lois, 321 Defleur, Melvin, 321 Dekavalla, Marina, 155 de Leeuwe, Evelyn, 49 Della Porta, Donatella, 20 Delorme, Helène, 264, 265, 267 Delors, Jacques, 264 Delpeuch, Thierry, 18 Demarty, Jean-Luc, 264 Demazière, Didier, 214 Demortain, David, 190 de Seze, Maëlle, 9, 322 Devinck, Jean-Claude, 193 de Vreese, Claese, 143, 146, 148, 149, 328 De Vries, Catherine, 81 de Waal, Matijn, 141 Dezalay, Yves, 264 D’heer, Eivelien, 165 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 173, 174, 178 Di Maggio, Paul, 43, 157

340

AUTHOR INDEX

Dixon, Ruth, 235 Dobbin, Frank, 40 Dodson, Kyle, 11 Dolezal, Martin, 81, 242 Dolowitz, David, 18 Doshi, Rush, 233 Dowling, Tim, 180 Dubois, Vincent, 100, 103, 258 Dwyer, Janet, 261, 262, 266 E Edwards, Erica, 246 Edwards, Paul, 278, 281, 283 Egan, Patrick, 239 Eide, Elisabeth, 164, 175 Elder, Charles, 3, 79, 97, 306 Elias, Norbert, 6 Engblom-Pelkkala, Kristiina, 235 Engeli, Isabelle, 27 Ennser-Jedenastik, Laurenz, 81, 242 Entman, Robert, 112, 143 Erbe, Jessica, 139, 140 Erbring, Lutz, 97 Evans, David, 259 Evetts, Julia, 214 Ezrow, Lawrence, 84, 242 F Falkner, Robert, 291 Fantasia, Rick, 14 Farlie, Dennis, 232–234 Farrell, David, 232 Faucher-King, Florence, 267 Faure, Alain, 307 Fee, Elisabeth, 49 Felstiner, William, 9 Fidler, David, 49 Finnemore, Martha, 42 Fisher, Angelina, 231, 233, 234 Flaxman, Seth, 166 Fligstein, Neil, 164

Forman, Lisa, 54 Fortané, Nicolas, 211, 217, 223 Fouilleux, Eve, 265, 266, 272, 317 Foyer, Jean, 6, 289, 290 Franks, Suzanne, 327 Fraser, Nancy, 139, 165, 179, 323, 325 Freelon, Deen, 167 Freke, Vuijst, 326 Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, 277, 279, 280 Freudenburg, William, 33, 189 Frickel, Scott, 193 Fuchs, Christian, 166 Fukuyama, Francis, 284 Fustukian, Suzanne, 49 Fynbo, Lars, 211

G Galiana, Isabel, 289 Gali, Jordi, 33 Gallagher, Michael, 138 Galpin, Charlotte, 144 Gamson, William, 127 Gans, Herbert, 13 Gardon, Sébastien, 190, 192 Garrett, Geoffrey, 40 Gearing, Amanda, 329 Gilardi, Fabrizio, 40, 41 Gilbert, Claude, 51, 189 Girard, Pierre-Marie, 50 Glenn, John, 31 GlobeScan, 33 Glynn, Carroll, 97 Glynn, James, 2, 31 Goaschino, Edoardo, 5 Goel, Sharad, 166 Goetz, Edward, 97, 101 Goffman, Erving, 99 Goldenberg, Eddie, 97 Gong, Shanna, 14, 78, 89, 213 Gopalan, Sandeep, 36

AUTHOR INDEX

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 122, 123, 330 Gordon, Margaret, 97, 101 Gore, Al, 177, 289 Gradmann, Christoph, 226 Grafos, Harrison, 189, 196 Grande, Edgar, 158 Grant, Wynn, 257, 270 Gray, Noella, 289 Green, Christopher, 289 Greene, Zachary, 75 Green-Pedersen, Christoffer, 12, 17, 27, 74–79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87–89, 91, 140, 235, 237 Greenwood, Brian, 52 Grek, Sotiria, 233, 235–237, 250 Grevsmühl, Sebastian Vincent, 278 Grossman, Emiliano, 8, 97 Grossmann, Matt, 79 Grubb, Michael, 287 Grundmann, Rainer, 164 Gruys, Kjerstin, 14, 78, 89, 213 Guillemot, Helène, 164 Guinaudeau, Isabelle, 120 Guo, Lei, 137 Gusfield, Joseph, 3, 36, 99, 119, 128, 189, 212 Gustafsson, Line, 238, 244, 247

H Haas, Peter, 35, 50, 166, 190, 280 Habermas, Jurgen, 165, 323, 325 Hafez, Kai, 137 Hafner, Tamara, 50 Hale, Thomas, 291 Hallin, Dan, 19, 322, 327, 331 Hänska, Max, 142 Hardin, Garrett, 285 Harris, Samantha, 177 Hart, Sol, 164 Hassenteufel, Patrick, 13, 17 Häusermann, Silja, 237

341

Hawkins, Ann, 282 Hay, Colin, 258 Hecht, Gabrielle, 117, 118 Heckel, Heather, 33 Helft, Annett, 330 Henry, Emmanuel, 10, 33, 51, 188, 189, 213, 258, 293, 324 Hepp, Andreas, 101, 331 Herbst, Suzan, 97 Hermida, Alfred, 141 Hilgartner, Stephen, 50, 99 Hinchliffe, Steve, 212 Hindman, Matthew, 166 Hindmarsh, Richard, 131 Hite, Kristen, 2 Hladík, Radim, 166 Hobaek, Bård, 226 Hobolt, Sarah, 242 Hobsbawn, Eric, 256, 257 Hodge, Ian, 262 Hohm, Charles, 31 Hollande, François, 147 Holton, Avery, 137 Holzinger, Katharina, 43 Hood, Christopher, 235 Hooghe, Liesbet, 246 Hopmann, David-Nicolas, 164 Howlett, Michael, 213 Hubbard, Jeffrey, 321 Hulme, Mike, 295 Hunsmann, Morritz, 50 I Ingold, Tim, 278 Ingram, Alan, 54 Itçaina, Javier, 258 Iyengar, Shanto, 143 Izambert, Caroline, 61 J Jacobs, Alan, 307

342

AUTHOR INDEX

Jaffee, Daniel, 36 Jahn, Detlef, 86 Jakobi, Anja P., 29 Jang, Mo, 164 Janning, Frank, 215 Jasanoff, Sheila, 190, 278 Jas, Nathalie, 193 Jaumotte, Florence, 33 Jenness, Valérie, 32 Jennings, Will, 91 Jensen, Carsten Strøby, 211, 235, 237 Jeong, Sun, 137 Jerolmack, Colin, 215 Jessop, Bob, 284 Jobert, Bruno, 258, 264 John, Peter, 75 Jolly, Seth, 246 Jones, Bryan, 40, 75, 76, 79, 97, 213, 234 Jordan, Grant, 257 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 147

K Kaijser, Arne, 118 Kane, Mark, 53 Katzarova, Elitza, 8, 18, 29, 30, 38, 190, 293, 307 Katz, Elihu, 331 Kaul, Inge, 285 Kauppi, Niilo, 18 Keck, Margaret, 11, 20, 35, 50 Keeling,David, 279 Kelley, Judith, 231, 233, 234, 238 Kernell, Samuel, 112 Ki-moon, Ban, 176 Kingdon, John, 17, 40, 213, 234, 235, 238, 306 Kingsbury, Benedict, 231, 233, 234 Kirchhelle, Claas, 226 Kitschelt, Herbert, 237 Kitsuse, John, 3, 32, 34, 166

Kleinen-v.Königslöw, 323 Klein, Naomi, 279 Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, 241 Knaggard, Ana, 17 Knill, Christoph, 43 Knodel, Philipp, 233, 237, 244, 250 Koch, Matthias, 287 Köhl, Helmut, 126, 133 Kolmer, Christian, 328 Königslöw, Katharina Kleinen von, 138, 323 Koopmans, Ruud, 139–141 Koplan, Jeffrey, 49 Kraft, Jonas, 237 Kragh, Kristen, 227 Krasner, Stephen, 284 Kriesi, Hans-Peter, 157, 158, 237 Krimsky, Sheldon, 198 Krippendorff, Klaus, 168 Kristensen, Thomas, 12, 16, 324 Krogstrup, Jesper, 82 Krosnick, Jon, 322 Krotz, Friedrich, 331 Krzyzanowski, ˙ Michael, 145 Kulovesi, Kati, 289 Kunelius, Risto, 164, 168, 175

L Lacombe, Delphine, 42 Lafferty, John, 149 Lamy, Pascal, 266 Lang, Kerry, 289 Larsson, Anders-Olaf, 165 Latour, Bruno, 5, 42, 292 Laurens, Sylvain, 11, 188, 303, 311, 316 Lawson, George, 28 Lay, Samantha, 106 Le Bianic, Thomas, 214 Lecheler, Sophie, 146 Lee, Kelley, 41, 49

AUTHOR INDEX

Lefevere, Jonas, 80 Leff, Dona, 97, 101 Le Galès, Patrick, 267 Legras, Guy, 264 Le Grignou, Brigitte, 132 Lehrer, Roni, 84 Leisering, Lutz, 8 Lemoine, Maud, 50 Le Renard, Claire, 118 Leruth, Benjamin, 144 Lie, Anne Kveim, 226 Lindenberg, Nannette, 289 Linders, Annula, 14, 41, 213, 217 Lippert, Randy, 15, 32 Lipschutz, Ronnie, 285 Little, Paul, 287 Liu, Dongxiao, 42 Livingstone, Sonia, 101 Locher, Fabien, 277, 279, 280 Lowe, Philip, 267, 268 Lühiste, Maarja, 79 Lynch, Mark, 326

M MacDonald, Kenneth, 289 Mahony, Martin, 295 Maier, Daniel, 141 Maloney, William, 257 Mancini, Paolo, 331 Mangenot, Michel, 264 Manow, Philip, 243 Marchetti, Dominique, 104, 106, 107, 322 Markowitz, Gerald, 197, 198 Marsh, David, 18 Marsh, John, 257, 267 Martens, Kerstin, 232–234, 236–238, 243, 244, 250 Marteu, Elisabeth, 42 Martin, John Levi, 100 Mattli, Walter, 28

343

May, Peter, 213 Mazur, Allan, 2, 20, 31 McAdam, Doug, 18, 164 McAllister, Ian, 232 McCombs, Maxwell, 3, 97 McConnell, Allan, 270 McCoy, Jennifer, 33 McIlwain, Charlton, 167 McLaren, Lauren, 142 McLaughlin, Andrew, 257 Meguid, Bonnie, 81 Merkel, Angela, 127, 134, 147 Merry, Sally, 231, 233 Merson, Michael, 49 Mesirow, Lynne, 278 Meyer, Christoph, 141 Meyer, David, 39, 43 Meyer, Jan-Henrik, 118 Mez, Lutz, 131 Michaels, David, 198 Miller, Arthur, 97 Miller, Clark, 278, 281 Miltner, Peter, 141 Mitterrand, François, 264 Mitvedt, Tore, 226 Modigliani, André, 127 Moe, Hallvard, 165 Mohr, John, 157 Molotch, Harvey, 97, 101 Montello, Daniel, 164 Morales, Laura, 79 Morena, Edouard, 6, 176, 177, 289, 291 Mortensen, Peter-Bjerre, 75, 76, 81 Moses, Julia, 6 Mouffe, Chantal, 164 Moulin, Anne-Marie, 52, 54 Moussu, Nils, 175, 177, 179 Moynihan, Donald, 231 Mügge, Daniel, 234 Müller, Birgit, 175, 177, 179 Muller, Pierre, 258, 307

344

AUTHOR INDEX

Mullers, Manuel, 235 Müller, Wolfgang, 81, 131, 242 Munro, William, 19 Munson, Abby, 287 Muraskin, William, 52, 53 Murphy, Michelle, 192 N Nadaï, Alain, 283 Nadelmann, Ethan, 29 Nag, Manish, 157 Nash, Kate, 323 Narain, Sunita, 294 Naurin, Daniel, 311 Nebeker, Frederik, 280 Neff, Tim, 10, 168 Neff, Timothy, 326 Neveu, Erik, 7, 8, 18, 74, 132, 143, 165, 166, 188, 190, 215, 231, 232, 258, 278, 293, 307, 324, 325 Newell, James, 150 Newell, Peter, 278 Niemann, Dennis, 233, 234, 236, 243, 244, 250 Nohrstedt, Daniel, 131 Nollet, Jérémie, 6, 100, 157 Normand, Romuald, 214 Nottias, Toussaint, 327 Nouguez, Etienne, 307 Nuytemans, Michiel, 142 O Obama, Barack, 147, 288 Offerlé, Michel, 303 Ohmae, Kenichi, 284 O’Keefe, Garret, 97 Okwo-Bele, Jean-Marie, 52 Olausson, Ulrika, 329 Olesen, Thomas, 165 Oliver, Tim, 144

Oppenheimer, Gerald, 54 Oreskes, Naomi, 282 Ostrom, Elinor, 285 Otjes, Simon, 76, 81, 85, 88 Ouvrier, Ashley, 52, 54

P Palau, Anna, 75 Paletz, David, 112 Paradeise, Catherine, 214 Pardos-Prado, Sergi, 235 Parey, Charles, 191 Parkhurst, Justin, 50 Pasquino, Gianfranco, 147 Paternotte, C., 35 Paterson, Chris, 327 Paull, Jefrey, 193 Payre, Renaud, 190 Pearce, David, 267 Pelletier, David, 51 Perl, Anthony, 213 Peters, Bernhard, 138, 323 Peterson, Tarla Rai, 164 Petiteville, Franck, 28 Petrocik, John, 232, 234 Pfetsch, Barbara, 141, 144, 330 Pierru, Frederic, 214 Piquerez, Lorène, 228 Plümper, Thomas, 243 Podolsky, Scott, 226 Poell, Thomas, 141 Polk, Jonathan, 246 Pons, Xavier, 35, 233, 238, 245 Ponte, Stefano, 301, 314, 316 Porter, Tony, 317 Potter, Joshua, 235, 238 Powell, Walter W., 43 Power, Alison, 282 Prattico, Emilie, 177 Priestley, Rebecca, 131 Princen, Sebastiaan, 3, 17, 89

AUTHOR INDEX

Prins, Gwyn, 289 Proctor, Robert, 198 Prodi, Romano, 266 Protess, David, 97, 101 Pump, Barry, 213

345

Q Quissell, Kathryn, 51

Rosenau, James, 33 Rosner, David, 197, 198 Ross, Jennie Keith, 75 Ross, Marc Howard, 75 Roubaud, François, 317 Rovny, Jan, 246 Rüb, Friedbert, 17 Rucht, Dieter, 18 Rutherford, Ken, 36

R Raguin, Gilles, 50 Rambukkana, Nathan, 164, 165 Ranney, Austin, 138 Rao, Justin, 166 Rasmussen, Anne, 191 Razafindrakoto, Mireille, 317 Reagan, Ronald, 330 Rebich-Hespanha, Stacy, 164 Redclift, Michael, 278 Reddy, Srinath, 49 Reghezza-Zitt, Magali, 295 Reich, Michael, 55 Reinhardt, Carsten, 193 Reinicke, Wolfgang, 50 Renzi, Matteo, 138, 146, 153, 155, 158 Retzloff, Sean, 164 Rhodes, Rod, 269 Rice, Daniel, 164 Richardson, James, 14 Risse, Thomas, 140 Roberts, Jody, 190 Robertson, Rolland, 20 Robinson, Piers, 328 Robinson, Priscilla, 49 Rodriguez, Mario, 49 Roehrlich, Elisabeth, 117 Roger, Antoine, 258 Roggeband, Connie, 7 Roncarolo, Franca, 10, 11, 323, 328 Rose, Max, 17

S Sagarzazu, Inaki, 235 Saguy, Abigaïl, 14, 74, 89, 112, 213 Santiago, Anna, 20 Sarat, Austin, 9 Sassen, Saskia, 20 Saunier, Pierre-Yves, 189 Sauterey, Raymond, 191 Sayre, B., 141 Schattschneider, Elmer, 10, 73 Scheufele, Dietram, 143, 148 Schlesinger, Philip, 108 Schlichting, Inga, 164 Schmitz, Hans-Peter, 51 Schneider, Mycle, 131 Schneider, Stephen, 278 Schoenbach, Klaus, 141 Schoonvelde, Martinjs, 235 Schudson, Michael, 104 Schulze, Kaï, 302 Schumacher, Gijs, 235 Schuman, Robert, 260 Schurman, Rachel, 19 Seeberg, Henrik, 81, 88 Seitz, John, 2 Sellers, Christopher, 192, 193 Sell, Suzan, 312 Semetko, Holli, 145, 328 Sewankambo, Nelson, 49 Seymour, Emily, 101, 107 Shapiro, Robert, 97

346

AUTHOR INDEX

Shaw, Donald, 3, 97 Sheail, John, 260 Shehata, Adam, 164 Shiffman, Jeremy, 50, 51, 59 Shilliam, Robbie, 28 Shindell, Matthew, 282 Shoard, Marion, 260 Sifft, Stephanie, 138, 323 Sigelman, Lee, 81 Sikkink, Kathryn, 11, 20, 35, 42, 50 Simmons, Beth, 40, 231, 233, 234 Simon, Adam, 233 Simonin, Daniel, 8 Smith, Andy, 28, 258 Smith, David, 21 Smith, James, 54, 304 Smith, Martin, 257 Smith, Stéphanie, 59 Snarr, Michael, 2 Snarr, Neil, 2 Snidal, Duncan, 36 Snow, Robert, 101 Song, Hyunjin, 166 Sonnett, John, 164 Soroka, Stuart, 142 Soule, Sarah, 17, 27 Southwood, Richard, 105 Spector, Malcolm, 3, 32, 34, 166 Spoon, Jay, 81 Staggenborg, Suzan, 39 Stark, Alastair, 270 Statham, Paul, 144 Steffens, Lincoln, 321, 322 Steiner-Khamsi, Gita, 8 Stern, Mark, 285 Štˇetka, Václav, 166 Stewart, Elbert, 2 Stone, Deborah, 51, 77, 234, 238 Strang, Daniel, 17, 27, 43 Strange, Susan, 284 Strömback, Jesper, 143, 148 Strudsholm, Erling, 227

Sullivan, Francis, 287 Sunstein, Cass, 11 Surdez, Muriel, 6, 12, 143, 188, 228, 278, 293, 324, 325 Swales, Vicky, 261 Sylvestre, Guillaume, 165 T Tallberg, Jonas, 42 Tarrow, Sidney, 20 Tauer, Sandra, 126 Tavits, Margit, 235, 238 Taylor, Peter, 282 Telhami, Shibley, 322 Thaler, Richard, 11 Thatcher, Margaret, 260 Théret, Bruno, 258, 264 Thomas, Steve, 131 Thomson, Kenneth, 273 Thomson, Koy, 287 Thoms, Ulrike, 226 Thorup-Larsen, Lars, 27 Thunberg, Greta, 331 Thurner, Paul, 131 Thursz, Mark, 50 Timmermans, Arco, 18, 76, 89 Toke, Dave, 19 Tolba, Mustafa, 286 Topçu, Sezin, 118 Torny, Didier, 215 Tosun, Jale, 302 Traber, Denise, 235 Trenz, Hans-Jörg, 144 Tresch, Anke, 80 Troeger, Vera, 243 Trumbo, Craig, 164 Tyler, Tom, 97, 101 U Uberti, David, 329 Uleri, Pier, 138

AUTHOR INDEX

Urpelainen, Johanes, 164 Usherwood, Simon, 155 V Vakkuri, Jarmo, 235 Valbruzzi, Marco, 147 Valkenburg, Patti, 145 Van Aelst, Peter, 98, 111, 142 Van Audenhove, Leo, 139, 142 Van de Steeg, Marianne, 140 Van Dijck, José, 141 Varone, Frederic, 87 Vauchez, Antoine, 19 Väyrynen, Raimo, 32 Verdegem, Pieter, 165 Vliegenthart, Rens, 17, 156 Volkens, Andrea, 241 Volkmer, Ingrid, 165, 326 Vonbun, Ramona, 141 W Wagner, Markus, 81 Waldherr, Annie, 141 Walgrave, Stefaan, 17, 75, 80, 87, 98, 111, 142, 156 Walker, Edward, 36 Walt, Gill, 51 Wang, Hongying, 33 Ward, Hugh, 84

347

Ward, Neil, 267 Washer, Peter, 106 Wasserheit, Judith, 49 Weaver, Kent, 307 Webb, Michael, 317 Wei, David, 177 Wessler, Hartmut, 138, 323, 327 Whiteside, Alan, 54 Wibowo, Anton, 196 Wilkerson, John, 76, 77, 79, 89, 234 Williams, Raymond, 256 Winkler, Anna Katharina, 81, 242 Wolfe, Michelle, 74 Wooders, Peter, 289 Workman, Samuel, 213 Wright, Katharine, 155

Y Yagodin, Dmitri, 164, 168 Yanovitzky, Itzhak, 97 Yearley, Steven, 277, 278 Yulsman, Tom, 166

Z Zayani, Mohamed, 327 Ziv, Ilan, 326 Zielhuis, Rainier, 196 Zucker, Harold, 142, 148

Index

A Abortion, 39, 41 Advocacy, 148 Advocacy Networks, 11, 35, 50, 56, 61, 279, 302 Afghanistan, 327 African Union, 38 Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire de l’Alimentation, de l’Environnement et du travail (ANSES), 201 Agencies, 119, 125, 126, 128–130, 325. See also Regulatory agencies Agendas, 8, 27, 31, 36, 43, 163, 316, 331 administrative agenda, 217, 226 agenda-building, 97 agenda drivers, 74, 79 agenda-setting, 3, 4, 17, 50, 73, 78, 79, 83, 89, 90, 95, 97–100, 102, 106, 110, 111, 140–143, 157, 213, 226, 321, 322, 332 agenda transnationalization, 213

media agenda, 90, 97, 100, 101, 104–106, 109, 144 party political agenda, 74–76, 83, 90 policy agenda, 55, 76, 79, 144 political agenda, 74, 77, 79, 88, 91, 97, 101, 105, 234, 282, 290 Agenda setting, 9 Agentless abstraction, 98 Agonistic pluralism, 164, 178 Alliance, 9, 11, 15, 17, 311, 314 American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), 41 Anthropocene, 292 Antibiotic resistance, 211, 216, 219–221, 223–227 Arenas, 13, 38, 39, 99, 100, 139, 164, 188, 190, 191, 198–200, 203–205, 290, 315, 323, 324 Attention, 73, 78, 80–82, 85–89, 91, 95, 97, 98, 239, 242, 243, 246 drivers of attention, 74 issue attention, 73, 81, 84, 89, 90

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 E. Neveu and M. Surdez (eds.), Globalizing Issues, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52044-1

349

350

INDEX

media attention, 277, 294 political attention, 78, 325 Australia, 15 Austria, 145 Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN), 119, 124

B Belgium, 74, 84, 87 Benchmarking, 238 Biofuels, 7, 12, 19, 188, 301, 302, 304–308, 310, 312–316 Borders, 2, 7, 14, 19, 117–119, 126–128 Brexit, 138, 144, 145, 154 Bureaucrats, 10, 12, 15, 188, 200, 212–214, 218, 220–222, 224, 225, 293 Business companies, 5, 7, 11, 12, 19, 36, 302, 306, 308, 311, 315, 316

C Canada, 2, 15, 35 Capital, 100, 104, 166 bureaucratic capital, 316 cultural capital, 100, 166 economic capital, 100, 166 symbolic capital, 37, 100 Carrying capacity, 99, 107 Categories of international regulation, 40 Cause entrepreneur, 305 Celebrity, 178 Certification, 5 Chernobyl, 10, 78, 86, 118–128, 131 China, 41, 42, 172, 288, 291 Civil society, 11, 169, 171, 173, 177–179, 285, 287, 289, 290, 294, 330

Claims, 9, 13–15, 32, 41, 43, 131, 164–166 claims-makers, 3, 7, 9–11, 14, 17, 19, 32, 34, 41, 119, 126, 129, 188, 232, 293, 322, 324, 325 claims-making, 14, 32, 41, 119, 128, 163–167, 175, 177, 204, 278, 293 Clientelism, 269 Climate, 163. See also Environment Coalition, 82, 83 Cognitive approach, 32 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 9, 259, 263, 265, 266, 272, 302 Communities, 177 Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), 16, 75, 84, 91, 241 Comparative approach, 75 Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), 241, 242 Conference of Parties (COP), 287–291, 314 COP21, 163, 164, 166, 171, 174 Configuration, 6, 14 Construction of problems, 131 Constructivism, 3, 8, 9, 28, 213 Contagion, 31 Convergence, 31 Corruption, 29, 30, 33, 234 Council of Europe (CoE), 38, 39 Crime, 81, 87 Crime control, 29 Crisis management, 130 Cuba, 34 Cultural analysis, 99 Culture, 78, 112, 141

D Database, 196 Demonstrations, 125, 127, 134

INDEX

351

Denmark, 74, 82, 84, 85, 87–89, 217, 226, 228, 232, 240, 243, 245–249, 266 Depolitization, 200 Détour, 257, 263, 272 Digitalization, 141 Discursive opportunity structure, 322 Discursive work, 279 Dispositions, 100, 104, 108 Doctors of the World (MdM), 58, 60 Domestication, 137, 328, 329 Drivers, 77, 82, 83 Drunk-driving, 36, 97, 99

European Council, 125, 312 Europeanization, 139, 140, 144, 156 European Parliament, 9, 125, 303, 310–312, 314 European Union (EU), 5, 16, 38, 88, 89, 102, 120, 125, 126, 139, 144, 190, 196, 197, 215, 301, 302 Expertise, 4, 11, 195, 198, 200, 201, 219 Experts, 5, 7, 10, 15, 105, 108, 111, 119, 120, 127–129, 143, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198, 202, 203, 213, 278, 282, 293

E Econocrats, 258, 271 Ecosystem, 10 Education, 77, 232, 235–241, 243, 245–247, 249 Election, 242, 326 Electoral competition, 83 Electoral system, 82 Embargo, 107, 267 England, 225 Entrepreneur-translators, 307 Environment, 76, 78, 81, 85, 86, 89, 301, 315 climate change, 6, 7, 10, 74, 78, 90, 164, 166, 176, 278, 286, 292 Climate change skepticism, 172 climatization, 290, 292 pollution, 2, 3, 7, 8, 14, 172, 277, 284, 288 Epidemics, 6 Epistemic communities, 8, 35, 50, 56, 64, 166, 190, 280, 282, 322 Ethnography, 302, 316 European Commission, 125, 129, 197, 211, 216, 266, 273, 303, 305–308, 310, 312, 313, 324

F Fair trade, 6, 19 Field, 101, 104, 112, 157, 164, 167, 172, 175, 177, 179 administrative field, 101, 110, 111 field effects, 100 field of global health, 49, 55 field theory, 96, 100–102, 107, 109–111 journalistic field, 100–102, 104–110, 112 political field, 101, 105, 107–109 transnational social fields, 18 Finland, 35, 133, 247 Focusing events, 76, 78 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 310, 313, 317 Food safety, 19, 40, 193, 220, 311 Forest Stewardship Committee (FSC), 39 Foundations, 11, 35–37, 39, 291 Framework, 311 Framing, 7, 9, 11, 13, 36, 50, 51, 55, 56, 62, 63, 100, 106, 126, 143, 148, 166, 192, 193, 199, 223, 226, 279, 290, 294, 302, 308, 316, 322

352

INDEX

advocacy frames, 143, 148 definitions, 205 journalistic frames, 143 policy frames, 8, 279 France, 10, 39, 74, 78, 84, 85, 96, 102, 111, 112, 118–121, 124–126, 128, 144, 191, 196, 200, 216, 217, 225, 240, 243, 245 Friends of the Earth (FoE), 261 Fukushima, 10, 40, 78, 118–121, 123–128, 131

G GAFA, 42 Gambia, 65 Game theory, 285 Garbage Can Model, 18 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), 262, 263 Germany, 39, 74, 78, 84, 85, 102, 126–128, 131, 133, 134, 144, 145, 196, 200, 240, 243, 245 Global health, 49, 50 Globalization, 1, 3, 131, 188, 278, 292, 308 Global problems, 50, 51, 53, 57, 59, 67, 111, 118, 119, 130, 277, 284, 302, 307 circulation, 5, 98, 102, 111 definition, 31, 32, 35, 51, 130 diffusion, 14, 17, 38, 84 renationalization, 119 translation, 5 GlobeScan, 33 Governance, 17, 30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 43, 49, 51, 283, 284, 286, 288–292, 294, 307, 323, 324 Great Britain. See United Kingdom

H Habitus , 100, 108 HBV. See Health Health, 6, 76, 86, 89 Global health, 50, 51 global health networks, 50 health care systems, 77, 79 Hepatitis B Virus (HBV), 50–56, 59, 60, 62–64, 66 Hepatitis C Virus (HCV), 60, 61, 66 Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection/Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), 31, 50, 51, 53, 54, 58–65, 67 Human trafficking, 29 Hungary, 41 I Ideas, 10, 15, 19, 40, 258, 271, 289 Ideological work, 259, 262, 270, 271 Ideology, 242, 258 Illusio, 100, 108 Immigrant, 9, 330 Immigration, 31, 76, 81–83, 87, 112 India, 42, 329 Influence, 6, 12, 29, 32, 39, 43, 78, 83, 96, 99, 141, 142, 198, 232, 238, 294, 324 Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN), 118, 124 Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), 259, 273 Institutionalization, 194, 205 Instruments, 38, 141, 193, 197, 280, 291 monitoring, 8, 11, 231–238, 249, 250 rankings, 8, 12, 16 technical instruments, 197 Intellectuals, 5, 42 Interdependency, 3, 6, 7, 31, 330, 332

INDEX

Interest, 303, 311 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 283, 286 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 118, 120, 122, 124, 130, 132 International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), 35, 36 International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), 33 International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), 329 International Energy Agency (IEA), 307 International Gay and Lesbian Association (IGLA), 35 International Governmental Organizations (IGOs), 11, 35, 40 International Labour Organization (ILO), 4, 8, 33, 196 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 8, 33, 37 International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGO), 5, 35, 37 International Organization for Standardization (ISO), 195, 196 International organizations, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 38, 56, 74, 117, 123, 190, 194, 196, 203, 231, 234, 286, 302 International policies, 28 International relations, 4, 18, 27, 33, 38, 49, 112, 190, 285 as a discipline, 284, 286, 289 IR imagination, 28 realism, 28, 29 realism-constructivism, 29, 31 International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), 33 Internet, 142

353

Invisibilization, 188–190, 199, 200 Iran, 34 Iraq, 288, 327, 328 Issue characteristics, 83 Issues, 142 core issues, 82, 91 global issues, 329, 332 issue competence, 81 issue competition, 80, 81, 232–235 issue diversity, 75 issue dominance, 233 issue globalization, 216, 284 issue ownership, 80 issue transnationalization, 221 issue typologies, 79, 86 Italy, 146–148, 150, 153, 158, 196, 216

J Japan, 10, 102, 119, 123, 124, 129, 130 Journalism, 104, 167, 169, 173, 176, 322, 329, 330, 332 Journalists, 99, 106, 131, 141, 150, 151, 322, 327, 329

K Knowledge, 250 Knowledge economy, 77 Knowledge regimes, 20 Korea, 32 Kuwait, 288 Kyoto Protocol, 287, 288, 310

L Labelling, 187 Landmines, 35, 36 Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), 149, 157 League of Nations, 194, 195

354

INDEX

Limit values, 192–194, 197, 198 Lobbies, 5, 7, 11, 12, 36, 77, 235, 302–305, 307–311, 313–315 Luxembourg, 330

M Mad cow disease, 6, 96, 102–107, 219, 328 Mainstreaming, 42 Market-based solutions, 179, 262 Market failures, 256, 262, 267, 271 Markets, 302, 307, 323, 324 Marshall Plan, 37 Media, 3, 13, 14, 31, 148, 205, 235, 321, 322, 325, 328 digital media, 141, 156 legacy media, 141, 147 media attention, 118, 322 media capital, 101, 102, 108–110 media coverage, 95, 98, 102, 104, 106, 119, 120, 125–128, 328, 331 media event, 326, 329–331 media field, 101 media framing, 112 media logic, 101 media oriented decisions, 95, 110 Press, 103 sources, 141 social media, 328 transnational media, 10, 326, 327, 329 Mediatization, 101, 102, 108, 328 #Metoo movement, 32 Mobilizations. See Social movements Money laundering, 29 Monitoring, 216, 217, 220, 221 Moral panic, 15 Multiple streams analysis, 213

N Narratives, 123, 124, 130, 148, 166, 291, 322 National Farmers’ Union (NFU), 257, 263, 268–270 National Trust, 261, 268 Netherlands, 74, 82, 84, 85, 144, 200, 216, 232, 240, 244, 266 Networked communities, 167 New Labor, 256–259, 267, 268, 270, 272 New Public Management, 37, 271 News media, 84 News production, 4 News-section, 325 Newsworthiness, 90, 105, 107, 109, 132, 322, 331 New Zealand, 15, 37 Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), 5, 7, 10, 11, 35, 42, 57, 196, 200, 235, 278, 291, 303, 310–314 Non-problematicity, 33, 53 Normalization, 10 Norm cascade, 42 Norm diffusion, 41, 42 Nuclear safety, 117, 128–130, 193 Nudge, 11

O Obesity, 14 Occupational Exposure Limits (OEL), 196–199, 201 Occupational health, 189–191, 199–201, 204, 324 Organisation pour la Securité et la Coopération en Europe (OSCE), 38 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 16, 37–39, 122, 123, 196, 206,

INDEX

231, 232, 235, 236, 241, 247, 307, 317, 324, 325 Organization of American States (OAS), 38, 39

P Pax Toxicologica, 192 Permanent International Association for Road Congresses (PIARC), 192, 194, 195 Persuasion, 34 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), 12, 16, 35, 77, 232, 233, 235–250 PISA shock, 243 Planetarization, 280, 284, 292, 293 Poland, 41, 145 Policy agricultural/farming policy, 9 environmental policy, 260 health policies, 57, 63, 64 policy change, 271 policy frame, 8, 257, 259, 267, 270–272 policy network, 50 policy transfer, 4, 18, 43 Political communication, 108 Political Opportunity Structure, 18 Political parties, 77, 79–81, 87, 231, 235, 237–240, 242, 244–246, 249, 250 niche parties, 81, 83 party competition, 231, 233, 250 party manifestos, 84 party system, 81 Political system, 75 Politicization, 130 Politization, 194 Portugal, 102 Position papers, 302, 316 Post-Abortion Syndrome, 41

355

Primary definers, 302 Privatization, 188, 194 Problems. See Public problems Profession, 189, 214, 219, 221, 307 Professional practices, 188 Public goods, 255, 256, 262, 263, 267–269, 271 Public opinion, 3, 8, 31, 97, 165, 323–326, 328, 329 Public policies, 103, 110, 200 Public problems, 102, 112, 238, 322 construction, 3, 43, 104, 106, 128 constructivist approach, 4, 14, 213 definition, 102, 128, 132, 187, 278 ownership, 212 theory, 95 transnationalization, 7, 14, 27, 102, 187–190, 200, 204, 205, 224, 225, 294 Public spaces, 189 Public sphere, 118, 139, 142, 165, 323–325, 329, 332 European public sphere, 11, 139, 140, 144, 156 global, 142, 330 microspheres, 165 transnationalization, 139, 165, 179, 325 Punctuated equilibrium, 97

R Radioactive clouds, 7 Rainforests, 6 Rankings. See Instruments Reciprocal recognition, 196 Referendum, 138, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153, 157 Regulatory agencies, 5, 10 Repertoires, 11, 14, 18 Repoliticization, 294 Resource mobilization, 36

356

INDEX

Rhetoric, 167, 179 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), 259, 262, 263, 265, 273 Russia, 41, 180

S Satanism, 14, 32, 42 Scales, 9, 12, 332 scale effects, 212 scale game, 224, 307 Scandal, 30, 87, 111, 127, 267 Science, 4, 306 Scientification, 197 Scientific Committee on Occupational Exposure Limits (SCOEL), 197 Scientists, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 278, 284, 293, 322 Section, 124 Senegal, 65 Sexual harassment, 14, 32, 112 Silo, 19, 289, 305, 324 Simultaneity, 31 Social history of ideas, 5 Social media, 164, 328, 332 Social movements, 5, 11, 18, 36, 39, 117, 118, 123, 128, 278 effects, 123 global, 165 repertoires, 5, 9, 36 resources, 9, 39 transnational, 42 Social problems paradigm, 102 Social problems. See Public problems Social properties, 104 Social trajectories, 104 Socio-history, 99 Sources, 129 South Africa, 35 State, 29, 35 demandeur state, 36, 37, 41, 42

nation state, 28, 30, 33, 41, 126, 156, 284, 285, 323–325, 332 resister state, 36, 42 Strategic action fields, 179 Structural perspective, 258 Sweden, 74, 82–85, 87, 133, 145, 200, 232, 240, 244, 246, 247, 329 Swedish, 41 Switzerland, 12, 213–217, 219, 226 Symbiotic relationship, 101 Symbolic crusade, 99 goods, 97 order, 99 Symbolic interactionism, 99

T Technicization, 199, 203, 205 Television, 15, 103, 106, 119, 123, 326–328, 331 Theory of action, 97–99, 110, 111 Think tanks, 5, 8, 11, 235, 289–291 Trade unions, 11, 198, 200 Traffic safety, 6, 9, 188–191, 193–195, 199, 202, 204, 205, 324 Trajectory, 108 Translation, 15, 41, 42, 203, 290 as part of issue transnationalization, 5, 138, 142, 188 sociology of translation, 5, 42, 290 Transnational company, 324 Transnational construction, 322 Transnationalization. See Issues; Problems Transnational movements, 118 Transparency, 106 Twitter, 10, 143, 147, 148, 157, 164, 168, 177, 326, 328 as a social network, 165, 167

INDEX

357

hashtag public, 163–165, 167 tweets, 11, 149, 167–169 Twittersphere, 147, 149–151, 154, 156 Typologization, 39, 79

V Venues, 9, 14, 38, 39, 284, 293 Venue shopping, 38 Vietnam, 327 Viral Hepatitis, 51 Vote, 80

U Unemployment, 33, 85 Union, 228 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 133, 193 Unions, 226 United Kingdom, 15, 39, 41, 74, 84, 87, 145, 196, 216, 240, 244, 245, 248, 249, 266 United Nations, 123, 176, 194, 195, 202, 203, 281, 284–286, 289, 293, 295, 314 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 163, 177 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 56 United States of America, 2, 13, 15, 16, 30, 37, 39, 41, 58, 102, 131, 193, 200, 280, 288, 326 Universal values, 37 Unobtrusive, 142

W Warrants, 166, 175, 178 Watchdog Organisation, 8 Weapons of mass destruction, 34 Windows of opportunity, 40 World Bank, 37, 231, 310, 317 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), 33 World Health Organization (WHO), 4, 50–55, 57–60, 67, 68, 102, 124, 132, 196, 211, 216, 218, 224 World Hepatitis Alliance (WHA), 57, 58 World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 281, 282, 286 World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), 211 World Trade Organization (WTO), 33, 40, 231 Y Yo-Yo trajectory, 270, 271