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.In between it220 managing the home frontcan enjoy the efficiency of the shared-list by restricting itself to mainly activ-ities of remote attention and control, such as the following. Monitoring.The challenges on the shared-list need a regular check oftheir progress, especially when changing facts or norms in either thearena or on the home front make a review necessary. Correcting.Some partners in a common platform may develop differentinterests as time goes on.That may happen under pressure from theirhome front, opponents, officials or outsiders.Corrective activities maythen be necessary. Repairing causes.If a group regrets that a dossier had to be moved to theshared-list, for example due to the poor internal state (criterion 2), thenone has to address this cause in the meantime. Handling consequences.For example, the case of low urgency (criterion 4)should be used for at least some preparatory groundwork and maybe forsafeguarding a free ride (criterion 6), as otherwise a big problem mayarise in future. Exploiting nuisance value.If the lobby group has put a dossier on theshared-list only for the purpose of nuisance value or loss-compensation,then it may have to become active at some point. Testing consistency.At various moments it is useful to check whether thevarious dossiers on the shared-list are still consistent with each other andnot conflicting (unless so desired) or maybe overlapping.So far, this logic of strategy development, resulting in two PA agendas, ofcourse together forming one comprehensive agenda, may be seen as creat-ing an unpleasant amount of studious work to be followed by even more.The lobby group with the ambition to win and not lose its interests cannot,however, escape it and will be rewarded afterwards.Only an amateurishgroup lobbies blindly, without any thoughtful strategy.Such a group usual-ly lets the internal situation on the home front determine what should berealised externally.Long-listing, quick scans and shared-listing are emptycatchwords in its view.Its PA agenda is a wishful daydream, so to say its greatest happiness scenario, but only reflecting its demand side.Whenlobbying, it is at the mercy of the waves.In contrast, the professional or in-telligent lobby group knows that the quality of all preparatory work is mostcrucial for the final outcome at the EU level.It defines consciously the bestpossible strategy, agendas and targets.It sees, once again, all these prepara-tions for the fight not as a sacrosanct goal but only as a necessary means tosuccess.If it would blindly believe in its preparatory work, it would not be athoughtful player but rather a naïve bureaucrat.All preparations are usefulsetting the targets and the agendas 221only for some time to come, and to the best of available knowledge.Thebetter their quality, the more they help to achieve the desired outcomes.With What Result?Take the following case.In the 1993 Banana Dossier, the then Dutch Minis-ter of Agriculture and former Minister of Development Aid Piet Bukmansupported the Commission proposal (1992/359) to protect the  ACP ba-nanas coming from poor countries in the first Council reading.In doingso, he created a qualified majority (very marginal) in favour of the proposal.In the second reading, however, he supported the opposite case of marketliberalisation for the  dollar bananas (largely shipped through the Dutchharbour of Rotterdam) and became part of the overruled minority.Ulti-mately, he regretted his stupidity in not blocking the proposal at the firstreading [Pedler, 1994].The minister, being of two minds over what hewanted to support, clearly lacked a logically derived and consistent strategy.That may happen.An amateurish player wants to cover and forget such amistake as soon as possible.An intelligent lobby group, in contrast, wantsto learn from its mistakes in order to become smarter in future.Such a les-son is free as the price has already been paid by the loss.The core question here is how to assess the effectiveness or success of partic-ular lobby actions.The answer serves both the collection of hindsight wis-dom that can enhance future success and the accountability or maybe pres-tige on the home front.Whatever the reason behind it, the answer is lesssimple than it may seem.Of course, the ultimate justification of a lobbyaction is that it did create the desired outcome, even if in daily practice thelobby group may already feel happy with less than this, such as with a goodcompromise from the EU, enduring respect from stakeholders and stablesupport from home, as stated at the start of chapter 3.The desired outcomeremains, however, our reference point for the measurement of success.The professional group wants to see a causal relationship between its actionand the EU outcome, the dependent variable.Its action is not necessarily acase of doing something.As with the indeterminate arena, it may be a caseof not doing anything, and waiting and seeing instead.Whatever it decides,the group can be said to have influenced the EU if it has more or less causedan EU outcome as desired.However, causality is always difficult to deter-mine.Following David Hume [1748], one can even prove that, for at leasttwo reasons, causality in social life is impossible to prove perfectly.Firstly,during the time of the EU decision process, many more players may havetried and succeeded in influencing the outcome, which is normally a com-222 managing the home frontpromise.Due to this multicausality, a single impact is hardly possible to iso-late.Secondly, the lobby group can never know what would have been theoutcome if it had remained absent.The perfect control situation, necessaryfor the hard proof of causality, is not available in social life [Henning, 2004].All this may be considered true and disappointing.The alternative, how-ever, is not necessarily that one sees a decision process as a collection of in-cidents beyond any explanation.In terms not of strict causality but of plausi-bility, one can determine some dependency of the EU outcome on theaction of the lobby group, by making use of four next-best methods of as-sessing an influence or an impact [Van Schendelen, 1998, 13-17].In termsof validity, their rank-order is as follows.(1)Before-after.Here one compares the initial targets of the lobby group andother stakeholders with the final EU outcomes and tries to explain the latter,as well and plausibly as possible, by using the former.Then one may seewhether one or the other lobby group has plausibly acted as a factor or not.(2) Initial chances.Now one re-assesses the initial position of the lobbygroup, as revealed by the arena analysis, and its inherent chances of suc-cess.A small impact in an unfriendly arena may have to be considered agreater achievement than a big one in a friendly arena.(3) Reputation.Here the lobby group measures its reputation for influ-ence among EU officials and stakeholders, for example by asking them as informed experts to give their frank opinion about its performance in in-fluencing the outcomes.(4) Backing at home.This final one is a variant of the former.If the lobbygroup gets a stronger backing from its home front (such as facilities andmandate) after a lobby fight, even if this has not been won, then it hasgained at least some success here.These four next-best methods clearly have their weaknesses.They all fallshort on strict causality and the last two also on high validity and reliability.Besides, only the first two are clearly linked to the EU arena and thereforeappropriate for measuring the effectiveness of EU lobby actions, while thethird is linked to the different arena of stakeholders and the fourth to that ofthe home front.However, if the best method is impossible, the next-bestmethods are the best possible [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]