Declining influence of economic interests in the public consolation process for the revision of forest legislation?

Abstract

An important phase for the orchestration of Swiss policies is the pre-parliamentary process, which ends with a public consultation process. The main intention is to improve the proposal and to prevent a public referendum against the final legislation.

By analyzing – using quantitative and qualitative methods of text-analysis – the original answers of the different stakeholders and interest-groups in the public consultation process, their positions relative to the draft legislation are derived. This gives an indication about the relative influence of these actors in the initial phase of policy-making process.

Looking at the three latest rounds of revision (2010: forest law, 2012: forest decree, 2014: forest law) the results unveil that the forest owners have often taken similar positions than the environmental NGOs and sometimes stood even in contrast to the other actors of the forest economy sector. The revision proposal itself seemed to be positioned rather evenly in between the most important actors of the forest sector. Hence, one possible explanation for the perceived ineffective lobbying of the forest economy is that it is lacking unity.