Negotiation approach at agenda setting stage of the proposed national halal policymaking process

Abstract

Negotiation provides some different, yet interesting perspectives for contemporary public administration. In public policy, it helps to elaborate the processes involved in enhancing cooperation among government agencies and promote effective problem-solving within organisations. Existing literature indicates that there has never been any research that studies the role of negotiation in the process of policymaking in the Malaysia’s public administration system. Moreover, no proper documentation and clear guidance is available on how policymakers can reconcile any arising issues during policy consultation. Therefore, this study examined to what extent negotiation approach was exercised by policymakers in developing public policy agenda. The proposed National Halal Policy (NHP) is used as a case study. The data collection involved semi-structured interviews with 15 policy participants as well as document analysis on relevant government documents such as several discussion agendas on the proposed policy, the final draft of Halal Master Plan 2.0, relevant forms and templates. The 15 policy participants were representatives of policymakers and the stakeholders from the government, industry, academia, and non-governmental organisations. The data were analysed under the thematic analysis approach using Nvivo software. The results indicated that (1) the country already has its own negotiation mechanism in place to discuss the policy, (2) the functions of the agenda setting stage provide room for integrative negotiation to resolve the arising issues among the policy participants, and (3) those existing practices with several suggestions from policy participants towards the improvement of policy consultation which are based on the theory of principled negotiation, are conceptually manifested in the negotiation-based policymaking framework. The findings suggest that the policymaking process in public administration system is well-coordinated. The negotiation-based policymaking framework was proposed as guidelines to engagement in the public policymaking process. It provides support for any organisations, particularly within the government sector to conduct any form of policy consultation process. Considering that this is a pioneer effort in documenting policy process, this study has filled the gap in literature relating to existing practice in the policymaking process in the realm of public administration in Malaysia as well as developing countries.