Introduction

Lebanon currently grapples with overlapping crises: an unresolved financial meltdown, drastic migration outflows, stalling post-war reconstruction, and contested sovereignty. The present feels bleak, dominated by unproductive divisions across sectarian and external alliance lines – what political scientists call vertical cleavages. In such a context, it is worth looking back to a moment when a redistributive demand to “tax rents” took center stage and foregrounded a socioeconomic horizontal cleavage cutting across sectarianized identity divisions.¹Rents here are defined as income derived from the ownership or control of assets or privileges that exceeds the minimum return needed to induce their supply, in contrast to earnings from labor or from productive engagement in risk-taking and value creation in the real economy. In Lebanon, banking and real estate largely operate as rentier sectors: banking generates financial and regulatory rents, with above-normal returns on deposits and public debt sustained by policy choices, financial engineering, and continuous inflows of diaspora remittances; while real estate generates land and location rents rooted in ownership, zoning decisions, and speculative price appreciation.

This article treats the 2011-2017 battle to tax rentier incomes as a policy-process case study: it examines how ideas enter agendas, how they are maintained, and how they are reshaped. Using the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), the analysis centers on the rent-taxation policy subsystem and situates its dynamics within the broader political system and interactions with adjacent subsystems.²In ACF, a policy subsystem is the primary unit of analysis. It comprises the set of actors that regularly interact around a specific policy issue within a territorial scope, spanning multiple venues. Subsystems are nested within the broader political system, whose relatively stable parameters and external events condition subsystem dynamics. Paul A. Sabatier, “An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein”, Policy Sciences 21, no. 2-3 (1988), pp. 129-168, available at https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136406 It tracks two opposing coalitions and policy brokers as they navigated and generated political events and strategies. The narrative follows issue-coupling contests and delay and dilution tactics that shaped agenda setting and formulation. The analysis demonstrates how agenda maintenance mattered as much as entry, and how formulation was mediated by power games and brokers, with oscillating partisanships.

The studied policy battle transcended technical tinkering, directly challenging the regime’s operating model. In examining the 2011-2017 policy process, the author aspires to inform readings and actions within today’s stalemates by showcasing a map from the recent past of how horizontal claims can survive vertical divisions and yield new policy and organizational baselines.