by Jeongyoon Lee and David Lee

Policy actors often clash during policy processes, especially in contentious areas like climate change, gun control, and healthcare reform. These actors—including government agencies, private companies, and interest groups—frequently vie for influence, and political rivalries can lead to gridlock or policy failure. Understanding the drivers of these conflicts and how to manage them is crucial in order to propose strategies that can mitigate their effects, and enhance network coordination.

In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, we explore the causes of political competition and propose strategies for reducing it, using the case of local fracking policy processes in New York as an example. The fracking debate involves a wide range of actors, such as landowners, media organisations, oil and gas associations, environmental groups, city agencies, local governments, and legal organisations—all competing over whether fracking should be permitted in the state. But what drives these actors to clash so intensely? We explore the underlying reasons for these clashes, investigating whether competition arises from shared struggles for scarce resources, similar structural positions in resource-sharing relationships, differing policy beliefs or all three.

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