European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 203

European Policy Analysis

Of interest is that we were eager to
know if citizen groups, neighbourhood
committees, resident associations, etc.
would be included in the list. Even when
communities are symbolically at the
centre of the health argument, they may
be absent from the policy game (e.g., de
Leeuw and Clavier 2011; Löfgren, Leahy,
and de Leeuw2011). Community groups
were indeed included as stakeholders
and from here we adopted a normative
approach to explicitly monitor the
participation of these groups in the policy
making process and their position and
connectedness in the policy networks.
Ultimately, we found that their role and
position were peripheral.
Conceptual Reflection

Whereas stakeholder analysis
provides information on the set of actors
who (should) have a stake in a certain
issue, social network analysis provides
information on the interactions between
these actors. In other words, stakeholder
analysis describes the actor differentiation;
whereas network analysis describes the
actor integration related to a certain issue.
Network analysis is a tool to describe
and analyse the interactions between a
defined set of actors. Network analysis
considers the presence and the absence of
relations among actors (individuals, work
units, or organizations) more powerful in
explaining social phenomena than the
attributes of these actors (see e.g. Brass et
al. (2004) for an overview). Consequently,
actors are embedded within a network of
interconnected relationships that provide
opportunities for and constraints on their
organizational and political behavior.

As stated above, the most central
tenet of network mapping is that networks

exist around certain issues: the same set
of actors involved in the implementation
of vaccination programs may display an
entirely different network configuration
when mapped for their annual Mardi
Gras participation. In the exploratory
phase of our research, therefore, we
reviewed whether “local policy for
health” was in fact such a demarcated
issue (Laumann, Marsden, and Prensky
1989). Stakeholders informed us that
this was not the case, and that they felt
that they interacted differently, and on
different dimensions, with other local
stakeholders in engagements that not
necessarily were construed to be related
to “health.” From this feedback we
decided to map three networks for all
four municipalities: communication for
health policy development, involvement
in public health action, and strategic
(or opportunistic) collaboration. These
approaches to network mapping emerged
from the participatory engagement with
local policy for health processes, and were
not initially operationally aligned with
Kingdon’s Multiple Streams work. The
data on interaction between stakeholders
in these domains were obtained from
a structured questionnaire filled out
during interviews. We calculated density,
centralization and actor centrality of the
abovementioned networks. The result
of these calculations indicated that
all networks described were relatively
stagnant over the three year period that
they were observed, without discernible
policy entrepreneurial activity, with
policy ownership attributed to (and
possibly reluctantly accepted by) local
government, and generally unaware of
the potential and capacity there was for
the development of local health policy.

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