Privileging the sub-sector: critical sub-sectors and sectoral relationships in forest policy-making

Policy analysis has usually been organized around the concept of the policy sector, which has served as the fundamental unit for analyzing policy change. The emergence of well-defined and institutionalized issue subsectors, however, has called the utility of a purely sectoral analysis of policy dynamics into question. Utilizing evidence from a case study of forest policy development in British Columbia, Canada, in the 1990s, this article suggests that understanding policy change in complex sectors such as forestry requires a more nuanced conceptualization and analysis of sector–subsectoral relationships than exists in the present literature. The article develops the notion of critical subsectors, capable of blocking or enabling overall levels and directions of sectoral policy change, as an essential tool required to understand policy dynamics.