Branching Out, Digging In: Environmental Advocacy and Agenda Setting

5. Venue Shopping in an International Context

111 5 Venue Shopping in an International Context The previous chapter examined patterns of participation in the Clayoquot Sound case in order to understand why and how it attracted the participation of actors around the globe. Battles over who gets involved in an issue are important components of policy conflicts because the extent of audience participation changes the nature of the conflict and shapes policy outcomes. As participation increases, the balance of power among the original policy actors often shifts as segments of the public weigh in on one side or the other. In contrast, limited public participation tends to safeguard existing power relationships in the decision-making process. Strategies aimed at expanding or restricting the scope of participation might be, as Schattschneider (1960) claimed, the key strategy in politics. As shown in the previous chapter, Clayoquot environmentalists actively sought outside allies after concluding that they could not fight and win the battle for forest protection on their own. The global network of activists and transnational environmental groups that eventually joined the conflict over Clayoquot Sound shifted the domestic balance of power in the B.C. forest policy subsystem. The once dominant industry-government alliance found itself, in the early to mid-1990s, facing a significantly larger and stronger set of opponents. Although the provincial government and timber industry first attempted to contain participation in the conflict, they eventually competed with environmental activists for the public’s sympathy. Baumgartner and Jones (1993, 36) argue that advocacy groups seeking policy change are not limited to simply engaging a wider public. Their strategies and tactics are more sophisticated and complex, involving efforts to shift decision-making authority over a policy issue to a more favorable policy venue. Indeed, Clayoquot environmentalists’ decision to “go global” did not stem entirely from their desire to increase participation in the Clayoquot con- flict. After all, the Canadian audience was presumably large enough that if the domestic public got involved, they would tip the scales in favor of environmentalists . To fully understand why Clayoquot activists internationalized their campaign, we must consider the institutional constraints at the provincial and national levels in Canada. Environmental activists faced a closed, informal, and autonomous forest policy subsystem at the provincial level and limited alternate arenas at both the provincial and national level. These institutional constraints pushed the environmental coalition toward international venues and institutions with very different rules, norms, and procedures and allowed the environmental coalition to compete more equally and effectively with their opponents. The key to understanding strategies of venue shopping entails recognizing that policy venues differ from one another on several dimensions. If all venues contained the same structure of bias, then advocacy groups would hardly bene fit by shopping around for a different venue in which to press their claims. But because venues differ, with respect to their rules of access and participation , their decision-making procedures, their constituencies, and the incentives facing institutional actors, strategically minded advocacy groups will target a venue that offers the best advantage over their opponents. In a similar vein, competing advocacy groups will struggle to change (or protect) the rules governing decision-making processes in any particular venue so as to gain an advantage over their opponents. As Bosso (1987, 260) notes, “Whose game we play is as important, if not more, than the scope of that game in terms of the public role.” Rules set the stage for the next round of conflict and thus become important battlegrounds for competing advocacy groups. This chapter examines strategies of venue shifting in the conflict over land use and forest management practices in Clayoquot Sound. The following discussion highlights the different structures of bias in the various policy venues and the changing strategies of environmentalists as they attempted to shift policy arenas. I begin with a discussion of provincial venues and then focus on national and international arenas. Provincial Politics and the B.C. Forest Policy Subsystem The tight policy subsystem governing forest policy in British Columbia, described in chapter 2, started to break down in the 1980s as regional environmental conflicts in British Columbia increased the public salience of the 112 The Expansion of Conflict in British Columbia Forest Politics Venue Shopping in an International Context 113 forest issue. Opinion started to shift in favor of environmentalists as the public recognized a “forest...