The Involvement of Domestic Actors in Foreign Policy Making: The Netherlands and the Arctic

• Main Author: Verbeek Wolthuys, Johan Willem Nicolaas
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: Foreign Policy; Foreign Policy Analysis; Netherlands; Involvement; Allison; Arctic; Stakeholders
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/51828; http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-55290

The Netherlands has intermittently been active in the Arctic since the seventeenth century, but it was not until the early 2000s that a foreign policy covering its Arctic priorities was created. In April 2016, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands published the Polar Strategy 2016-2020 to present and clarify its objectives in the Polar Regions as well as the instruments to reach them. The main research question considered in this thesis is: to what extent were domestic stakeholders involved in the framing of the priorities of the Netherlands vis-à-vis the Arctic? Using three conceptual models developed by Graham T. Allison (1971) to facilitate the measurement of the level of stakeholder involvement, three types of dynamics are considered in the development process. Firstly, the main policy maker (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MFA) is free to involve stakeholders at its own convenience, deciding to accept their input or not (Model I); secondly, the policy maker acts as a coordinator of an organized structure of contributors (Model II); and the MFA one player among several others, and it has to bargain with those actors in order to achieve its objectives (Model III). This thesis finds that characteristics all three types of dynamics between involved actors and the MFA can be identified simultaneously in the policy making process. This indicates that domestic stakeholders are to a varying degree involved in the policy making process. The extent of their involvement seems to depend on whether their non-involvement in the policy making effort would jeopardize the process. As various different types of actors are forming a more organized structure, it becomes more challenging to categorize the actors as belonging to one of Allison’s conceptual models.