Policy pathways, policy networks, and citizen deliberation: Disseminating the results of World Wide Views on Global Warming in the USA

Leading a coalition spanning 38 countries, the Danish Board of Technology organized World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) on September 26, 2009. WWViews represented a pioneering effort to hold simultaneous citizen deliberations focusing on questions of climate change policy addressed at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in December 2009. Sponsors and organizers envisioned WWViews as a means to affect the COP15 negotiations, and the project included numerous strategies to influence policy-making. This paper examines the success of such strategies in the USA through the lens of 'policy pathways,' routes of influence to affect the behavior of policy-makers and policy-making bodies. Our analysis highlights the difficulty of connecting citizen deliberations to meaningful policy pathways, and the importance of recognizing and enlisting policy networks, which we define as the collection of relationships, nodes, or pre-existing organizational ties that can be mobilized in the service of agenda- or alternative-setting. Copyright The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.