Aaron J. Ley

The Adaptive Venue Shopping Framework: How Emergent Groups Choose Environmental Policymaking Venues

Scholars have succeeded in producing several explanations for why groups choose to pursue their policymaking goals in different venues. A synthetic framework that explains the choices these groups make is developed through two case studies describing a conflict over the environmental problem of agricultural field burning. Emergent, boundedly rational groups with a mission to clear the air of the pollutants associated with field burning are found to be choosing venues by strategically assessing the institutional context. The particular institutional context that matters involves three primary elements: the group’s mix of resources, opponents’ resource strengths, and the degree of venue accessibility. These initial choices allow groups to generate new resources, to learn about which strategies do and do not work, and to change venues on the basis of their new resources and what they have learned.

Policy Change and Venue Choices: Field Burning in Idaho and Washington

Grass seed farmers have burned their fields in Idaho and Washington State for decades. Field burning, however, creates small particulate matter air pollution, thus engendering a growing public backlash by the 1990s that manifested itself in new clean air advocacy groups. The new groups’ push for policy change eventually met with significant success in both cases. How did each set of advocates approach the challenge of policy change? More specifically, what kinds of policy venues did each group choose and why? This research uses the cases to explore and explain each clean air groups choices vis-à-vis hypotheses of venue choice. Three hypotheses are tested—Schattschneiders (1960) “expanded scope of conflict” thesis, ACFs (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1999) contention that groups strategically apply their resources in order to increase the likelihood of achieving their primary goal(s), and Pralles (2003, 2010) thesis that internal group constraints deter groups from moving into new venues.