| How does a policy community adapt to conflicting policies? What happens when the negative externalities of distributive policies are in conflict with regulatory policies? Does conflict trigger subsystem change? These questions are important to our understanding of the "inner life" of policy subsystems. Set against the backdrop of the Mississippi River watershed, the dissertation examines the region's navigation and flood policies; the negative externalities of wetland loss and hypoxia; and the public policies that address these externalities. The central hypotheses are that: (1) internal conflict between distributive and regulatory policies leads to the expansion of the policy community; (2) the growth of the policy community is unequal, causing winning and losing coalitions to form; and (3) as a losing coalition is formed, efforts to change both the policy image and the political venue increase. I find that the policy community is actually in decline, although organizations are taking an increasing interest in the problems of coastal wetland loss and the dead zone. In the pilot study on the hypoxia subsystem, conflict does indeed lead to the development of winning and losing coalitions. Finally, I find that losing coalitions are successful in altering the policy image in certain political venues. |
