Engagement duality: insufficiently organised civic voice against structural stakeholder organisations

The goal of the paper is to discuss the duality of engagement that emerges from the uneven capacity which is possessed by policy actors. Research methodology is based on qualitative data and their analysis. Semi-structural interviews with 8 respondents representing different interest groups were conducted. Respondents were selected from health care sector with the purpose to cover cases of society based interests (e.g. patients’ associations) and private interests (industry, health care institutions). The research has revealed rather diverse organisational capacities across the selected sample. The ways interest groups approach the political system vary a lot. Interest based organisations that represent pure private interests demonstrate a rather flexible interpretation of measures they deem to be suitable and select them according to the situation (for instance, they apply cooperation or competition simultaneously). More public oriented interest organisations seek more visibility, cooperation and usefulness for the society. We refer to capacity as the overall ability of a system to create value and based on this concept we construct the Interest group capacity model (Interest-CAP model) of five elements: Internal management capacity; Operational and analytical capacity; Advocacy capacity; Partnership capacity; Capacity to fulfil society needs. This model is operationally useful to equalize opportunities of policy actors to become participants of any interest group that emerges inside the society.