Social Embeddedness in Stakeholder Networks and Legislators’ Policy Preferences: The Case of German Livestock Policy

In a world of increasing complexity, politicians have only limited information about the relationship of policies and the outcomes. They often make use of simplified heuristics, i.e. policy beliefs. Hence, an influence opportunity for in- terest groups occurs: informational lobbying. It complements classic lobbying strategies, e.g. vote buying or campaign spending. Providing expert knowledge allows interest groups to influence legislators towards the preferred policy posi- tion. Aside from so-called "approved votes", German parliamentarians generally follow parliamentary group’s discipline. Thus, experts’ role within parliamentary groups is crucial. They deal with key issues and represent the parliamentary group in the committees. Furthermore, they work out the group’s positions on these specific issues. They are the starting point for interest groups to dissemi- nate their information and hence influence the legislators’ positions. An exemplary field of complexity is the agricultural sector. In particular, live- stock production is challenged by questions of sustainability, i.e. public expec- tations towards animal welfare, producers and consumers’ welfare as well as ecological consequences. Importance of animal welfare is demonstrated by the ongoing debate about piglet castration or husbandry system standards. This raises two questions: First, to what extend are stakeholders able to gain direct access to politicians? Second, how can they use this structure to influence policy decisions? Using a social network approach, we first investigate the structure of three networks: exchange of expert knowledge, political support and informal social ties. In particular, we put emphasis on the connection between parliamen- tary actors and other stakeholders from society, i.e. interest groups. This refers to the first question. Second, we apply a model of political exchange using infor- mation and lobbying networks. Following Henning et al. (2019), this model not only includes political exchange, but also belief updating. Moreover, it considers direct as well as indirect ties. This analysis step serves to answer the second question

An Assessment of Land Reform Policy Processes in Sierra Leone: A Network Based Approach

A predominantly agrarian country where land is one of the most important productive assets, land reform remains one of the most important but contentious policy issues in Sierra Leone. Despite several failed attempts to reform the country’s current land property rights and administrative arrangements, an assessment of these failed policy formulation policy processes have not been undertaken. In this paper, we use data collected during an elite network survey conducted in Sierra Leone in 2018 to quantitatively evaluate the recent land reform policy efforts that culminated into the 2015 National Land Policy. Specifically, we combine a belief formation model and a legislative decision-making model to quantify the knowledge-based power of the various stakeholders within the policy formulation process and the extent to which this power influences the policy beliefs of policy makers and other key stakeholders in the process formulation process. Our results indicate that the main policy beliefs, as it relates to reform or maintaining the current status quo, do not significantly change as a result of the exchange of expert information. This is because key stakeholders largely rely on their own control and only update their policy beliefs to a very limited extent after communications. Our results also indicate that the policy network structure in Sierra Leone facilitates consensus building, a process that might lead to increased ownership of policy programs by local stakeholders

Is Women’s Undernutrition Synonymous with Household Food Insufficiency? Evidence from Northern Ghana

Background: Policy making in Sub-Saharan Africa commonly assume that food and nutrition security programs that target food insecure households would most likely impact on malnourished individuals. This is despite the compelling evidence from elsewhere in the developing world that show a food distribution pattern that is discriminatory against women and girls in particular. Objectives: We attempt to examine the extent of the association between measures of women nutritional attainment and household food (in)security, where we determine whether distributional analysis of people’s nutrition can reliably predict women’s individual nutritional well-being from measures of household level food access. Secondly, we ask whether all malnourished women, or at least a large bulk of them are located within food insecure households, such that they can be reliably targeted through household level food security interventions. Results: A Spearman Correlation analysis between women’s nutritional attainment and household level food (in)security show a positive association at aggregate level; and among households that are considered to be food secure but not among households facing food crisis. We further adopt the use of concentration curves and Indices, as well as joint and conditional probabilities to establish a pattern of distribution on malnourished women across different levels of household food (in)security. Our results show that though a larger proportion of malnourished women are located within food insecure households; there is still considerable evidence of a wide dispersion of incidences of women undernutrition, where an average of 30% of malnourished women were located outside of 40% of the households whose food insecurity status was most severe. Conditional probabilities show more or less equal chances of women being malnourished irrespective of food security level of households within which they are located

Communicational and Lobbying Power in German Farm Animal Welfare Politics

Farm animal welfare is the main driver of nowadays criticism on German livestock sector. At the same time, non market actors more and more are key actors within animal welfare politics. Hence, we investigate political power of stakeholder organizations in German livestock policy. Our network based framework consists of two components: First, actors influence policy decisions through informational lobbying. Informational lobbying refers to providing expert knowledge in order to influence decision makers' policy beliefs. Second, the exchange of influence resources and power allows interest groups to influence the policy positions of political agents. We combine both measurements with the Banzhaf power index in order to quantify the power of both, political agents as well as interest groups. How this power affects animal welfare policy is illustrated in the field of piglet castration. Results imply that the agricultural sector as well as animal protection groups have the highest influence on beliefs and that state actors distribute most of the power to the agribusiness sector. This structures leads to a positive evaluation of surgical castration under anaesthesia. On the other hand, immunocastration is evaluated as rather useless. This implies that participatory processes decrease the procedures acceptance

Risk Management and its Implications on Household Incomes

The subject of risk in agricultural production is very pertinent and touches on various aspects such as investments, food security, income levels of farmers, and market stability. Unmanaged, risks can have profound impacts on the agricultural sector and at the same time severely hamper long-term economic growth and poverty reduction efforts. Furthermore, risk management by farm households are multifarious with each having different cost and benefit implications. Using empirical data from a nationally representative farm household survey in Senegal, we evaluated the effect of different risk management strategies employed by farm households on agriculture income and dispersions around incomes. We achieve this by employing a Multinomial Endogenous Switching Regression model and a Moment-Based Approach. We find mix results of the impact of risk management on agriculture incomes. The use of risk mitigation and transfer significantly reduces agriculture incomes while risk coping strategies significantly increases agriculture incomes. Risk mitigation strategies were observed to be associated with opportunity costs relating to income loss and likely inefficient resource allocations. On the contrary, the reduced agricultural incomes observed with the use of risk transfer might be related moral hazard problems such that insurance policy holders do not take care or expend less effort in their production activities. We also find that risk management strategies significantly reduce dispersions around agriculture incomes with risk transfer producing the largest effect. Furthermore, the effect of risk transfer strategies on dispersions around agriculture incomes is reduced when combine with other strategies. For the other risk management strategies, we find that when used in combinations, the dispersion reduction effect is greatly enhanced

A participatory physical and psychosocial intervention for balancing the demands and resources among industrial workers (PIPPI): study protocol of a cluster-randomized controlled trial

Background: Need for recovery and work ability are strongly associated with high employee turnover, well-being and sickness absence. However, scientific knowledge on effective interventions to improve work ability and decrease need for recovery is scarce. Thus, the present study aims to describe the background, design and protocol of a cluster randomized controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention to reduce need for recovery and improve work ability among industrial workers. Methods/Design: A two-year cluster randomized controlled design will be utilized, in which controls will also receive the intervention in year two. More than 400 workers from three companies in Denmark will be aimed to be cluster randomized into intervention and control groups with at least 200 workers (at least 9 work teams) in each group. An organizational resources audit and subsequent action planning workshop will be carried out to map the existing resources and act upon initiatives not functioning as intended. Workshops will be conducted to train leaders and health and safety representatives in supporting and facilitating the intervention activities. Group and individual level participatory visual mapping sessions will be carried out allowing team members to discuss current physical and psychosocial work demands and resources, and develop action plans to minimize strain and if possible, optimize the resources. At all levels, the intervention will be integrated into the existing organization of work schedules. An extensive process and effect evaluation on need for recovery and work ability will be carried out via questionnaires, observations, interviews and organizational data assessed at several time points throughout the intervention period. Discussion: This study primarily aims to develop, implement and evaluate an intervention based on the abovementioned features which may improve the work environment, available resources and health of industrial workers, and hence their need for recovery and work ability