Disintegration and discourse: Cross-sectoral story-lines in the German water and forest debates

Policy integration (PI) has been advocated in the literature as a solution to complex environmental problems. It is commonly defined as the joint development of policies across sectors, and deemed beneficial especially in face of cross-cutting issues. As there is little research addressing the ideational integration of two sectors, we introduce a new framework to discursively analyze horizontal policy integration (HPI) and then apply this framework to the German water and forest sectors. We follow the question whether in the context of interlinked forest and water disturbances cross-sectoral story-lines on German national level have occurred, which we assess by examining the story-line’s complexity, integration of other sector’s concerns, and cross-sectoral use. Although disturbances in the water and forest sectors are becoming more frequent, a fragmentation of the water and forest sectors has been observed in Germany in the past. The analysis is based on Hajer’s (1995) definition of discourse and follows his concept of story-lines which can be understood as the lowest common denominator across actor groups. We analyze policy documents on German national level, covering the debate on water and forest disturbances between 2018 and 21. Our results show that in the debates on water and forest disturbances there are commonly used story-lines across sectoral boundaries. The framework, however, enabled us to show an asymmetrical integration across sectors, where the forest sector addresses water concerns while the water sector treats forests as a non-subject. •Despite increasing disturbances the horizontal policy integration across the water and forest sectors in Germany remains low.•A new framework allows to assess the degree of ideational horizontal policy integration using the concept of story-lines.•We find early and asymmetrical signs of ideational policy integration across the two sectors.•The framework is especially fruitful for analyzing early signs of policy integration.