Civil Society Associations’ Efforts to Influence Post-Uprisings Governmental Policymaking in Three Arab States: A Regimes-Triad Approach

This article sets out to test an all too frequently undisputed assumption: contested politics and policy process theories or frameworks from the West, particularly the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) and the Social Construction in Policy Design Framework (SCPDF), can be plausibly ‘transported’ to the Arab world, without misleading biases. It describes and reflects upon practices of civil society associations (CSAs) to influence post-Uprisings public policymaking in three Arab states: Lebanon, Egypt, and Tunisia. The policy issues dealt with are domestic violence against women, and wage policy in Lebanon; dealing with NGOs in Egypt; and transparency of the state in Tunisia. This assumption, of course, is far from self-evident. Concepts like ‘advocacy coalition’, ‘problem stream’, or ‘policy entrepreneur’ describe role patterns in contested politics and policymaking practices in the context of consolidated Western liberal democracies; a context hardly applicable to post-Uprisings Arab states. Rather, we argue that public policymaking in post-Uprisings Arab states could be understood through a ‘regimes-triad approach’; i.e., a mutually dependent set of three strategic action fields—a domestic issue logic, and the logics of a national political regime, and a transnational or international geopolitical or geo-economic regime —around any policy issue. The regimes-triad context intends to correct the biases in western-canon theories of the policy process when applied to Arab states.