FACILITATING DIALOGUE, ENGAGING AND ADVISING AND ADVOCATING

Trade associations play specific roles to influence policies, which include: facilitating dialogue, engaging and advising policymakers and advocating for a policy. Most trade associations at national or EU level play more than one role in the policy influencing process. Advising policymakers seems to be the most frequent role but it is often combined with other roles.

Trade associations engage with and advise policymakers either upon the request from policymakers or they may play this role even when it is not explicitly solicited.

They engage with those in positions of influence, for three purposes:

• to provide evidence and technical advice on specific proposals and policies;
• to provide insight into the operations of business both in the public and private sectors and
• to encourage policy makers to act without imposing disproportionate measures that will have a detrimental effect on a sector to facilitate economic growth.

Expert advice is instrumental to the success of government policies. Governments everywhere spend considerable amounts of money on eliciting advice from experts. The best vehicle for seeking advice (consultancies, think tanks, commission inquiries, or roundtables) depends on a variety of factors: the nature of the issue , political considerations , the time frame of policy-making . Technical issues create the least difficulty in the advising process, while politically charged issues are laden with problems of conflicts of interest, both material and ideological. Long-term advising relationships are more productive than one-shot ones, as the former facilitates trust and reduces conflicts of interest.

Although trade associations in general recognize a preference for certain policy options and prioritize certain topics in their agendas, they may play a role in facilitating dialogue and bringing different stakeholders together to open up a debate or to close it by consensus. At first sight, maintaining an independent agenda while also playing the role of facilitator may seem contradictory. Despite this apparent contradiction, trade associations may successfully fulfil this role with different objectives in hand. In some cases the purpose is to facilitate support for an idea, in others to provide a platform for debate, or still in others to elicit the views of civil society in formulating recommendations or undertaking research.

In some cases, trade organizations play several roles, generating space for dialogue, advising different stakeholders, and advocating for a policy, topic, or approach. This do-it all strategy is not uncommon in countries where there is no tradition of public debate on policies. In political contexts with ’robust’ policy scenes (i.e. more open participation, higher density of participants, informed actors, etc.) trade associations may focus primarily on informing policy debate directly. However, in contexts where these scenes barely exist trade associations create them by constructing spaces of dialogue, mobilizing the public, advising different stakeholders, and rallying for the topic simultaneously.

Trade associations employ a variety of evidence to influence policy. Academic research seeks to answer the questions on why things occur and usually results in frameworks that aid researchers and policymakers to outline a problem. Planning research focuses on what could be expected of a given policy. Instrumentation research focuses on how to achieve a given outcome. Action research is ultimately concerned with achieving the desired goal. Trade associations use planning and instrumentation research for their advocacy strategies the most since it connect theory and practice.