The Role of Emotions, Power, and Politics in Setting Policy Agenda: A Theoretical Analysis of Policy Inaction in the Shipbreaking Industries in Bangladesh

Abstract

Agenda-setting may not always be a rational process and depends mostly on the perception of the policy problem made by the policy entrepreneurs to the decision-makers where ‘non-decision’ or ‘policy-inaction’ is also a kind of decision to avoid certain issues. Taking the existing ship-breaking policy of Bangladesh as a case study, this study tries to theoretically analyze how the level of public emotions and exercise of political power impact policy-making in a policy domain that resulted in no policy change. The study applies mainly two theories of public policy: the threshold model of the policy process by Christopher Pepin-Neff and the theory of three faces of power by Lukes which relates public emotions and political power with policy formulations. The study argues that, according to these theories, the case study is an example of high emotion policy threshold (HEHP) issue where, despite the initiatives by some policy actors to open a new policy window and the demands of the advocacy coalition consisting of International Labour Organization (ILO) and non-government organizations (NGO), the government used covert power to establish the preference of employment generation, national GDP and GNP and exclude the demand of policy-redesign from policy-agenda. The objective of this study is not to establish a new proposition of policy discussion but rather to discuss policy inaction or agenda-setting in an existing problem from a new perspective, theoretically from two distinct points of view: emotions and political power.