The "cycle of the political demands": a methodological model applied to the episode of contentious politics over the reform for water´s legal framework in Costa Rica

Abstract

This paper proposes a theoretical and methodological model for the analysis of the political process by focusing on the stakeholders, their demands and their power relations. It postulates that power relations can be studied by considering the effects produced by the exercise of power. To do so, it identifies the main stakeholders in a political process and their main demands. The model is applied to a specific episode of contentious politics in Costa Rica: the dispute over the reform for water´s legal framework occurred between 1996 and 2010. The so-called power spiral over the reform is composed by five different demands cycles in which many stakeholders, such as NGO´s, academic actors, ecologist and corporations, as well as political parties and public institutions debated and fought about the directions of the reform and in some cases tried to veto it. The power relations between them were studied, as said before, by identifying the main demand of each political actor and then evaluating their political incidence by considering the compliance (or not) of each demand at the end of the political process. This paper concludes that this method and in particular the study of the political incidence of the demands of the stakeholders serves as a causal mechanism of the outcome of the process and helps study power relations.