The Advocacy Coalition Framework provides an interesting but incomplete account of the role of ideas in environmental policy- making. Discuss

‘The members of each policy advocacy coalition in a policy sector share values and forms of knowledge which distinguish alliances from others. Different policy advocacy coalitions advance their ideas from within their expert knowledge citadels’.

The features of the ACF reflects policy as implicit cognitive and normative beliefs and was conceived as an alternative to rational theory and self- interested stages of public policy model. There are normally two to four competing policy advocacy coalitions (which form larger subsystems) that may comprise of bureaucrats, journalists, interest groups, supporters and professionals who all act together to oppose other conflicting coalitions in order to effect change. Sabatier’s basic premise that to understand the process of policy change a time perspective of ten years or more is required has neatly fitted into the research conducted 1964-65 in the Lake Tahoe case. Sabatier conducted over twenty years of field work at Lake Tahoe and collated data from a subsystems comprising of actors specialising in land and water quality issues. Sabatier built up a large amount of empirical evidence by gathering over 190 testimonies by 141 different people.  He found that the coalition comprised of local legislators and businesses, who having different sets of policy core beliefs, were able to coalesce to form the Environmental Coalition.

The Environmental Coalition faced strong opposition from rival the coalition consisting of members such as state government actors, legislators, business and property lobbyist and tourism boards, all of whom are advancing policy change in different directions. Conflicting strategies amongst the two coalition groups at Lake Tahoe were mediated by another group of actors which Sabatier terms as ‘policy brokers’ – a separate set of actors who are preoccupied with keeping the level of political conflict within reasonable limits whilst reaching compromise solutions.

The assumption that most policy situations are stable, needing at least ten years or more to change process paths, is not thoroughly demonstrated as Sabatier suggests that only exogenous factors can change this policy process. According to Sabatier, deep core beliefs are basic ontological normative beliefs which are very resistant to change therefore  it is the policy core which is determined by exogenous shocks and is susceptible to change, as these external factors affect the actor’s decisions and the policy making processes.

Changes in socio-economic conditions, system wide governing coalitions and policy decisions from other subsystems will impose and direct policy.  Sabatier maintains that because of these exogenous shocks, the Tahoe environmental coalition mobilised mounting support through strengthening coalition ties and witnessed an enormous increase in political resources. Though this represents a coalition’s basic normative commitments, it is hard to decipher how exactly the policy belief is measured and ideas subsequently changed. Sabatier fails to identify an adequate explanation of policy change and only provides a good yet rather descriptive analysis of what the environmental coalition at Lake Tahoe achieved.

Policy cores are the fundamental glue of coalitions because they represent basic normative and empirical commitments and this perhaps places too much emphasis, especially in environmental policy, on actors’ beliefs being all too readily swayed from external factors. Sabatier has overemphasised the effects of exogenous shocks in determining the trajectory of policy ideas and not enough labour on explaining ideas changing policy itself.

Thus so far ACF falls foul to being far too descriptive and failing to incorporate ideas on policy formulation and how they are changed.  If the stability of ACF is disrupted by exogenous shocks, an example for the purpose of this essay extreme weather phenomena, this according to Sabatier, can take up to ten or more years. Incompleteness of the ACF arises immediately as there is no hypothesis to activate coalitions earlier than the ‘stable’ ten year period. Often climate policy in particular needs to be far more pre-emptive and reactive, rather than awaiting a shock that forces a policy through hastily.

Environmental issues attract interest groups, campaigners and supporters, businesses, government actors and others who are likely to form coalitions, need to constantly evolve and form coalitions and are perhaps more highly dependent on deep cores beliefs first and foremost, rather than variable policy core beliefs further down the line.

The importance of policy- oriented learning is another aspect of ACF which is overly described, yet seldom explained. If indeed one of the main causes of ideas evolving is policy oriented learning and that such learning is instrumental in affecting policy over time, simultaneously there is a resistance to change deep and policy core beliefs. Therefore policy oriented learning is expected to change secondary aspects of a coalition’s belief system and changes to policy sore are once again reliant solely upon exogenous shocks.

The external factors hypothesis as mentioned above, can also have a noticeable defect in addressing extreme environmental incidents or rare hazardous weather conditions which may place impetus upon policy change, Sabatier does not reflect on what happens to policy ideas if these exogenous shocks do not change policy core beliefs. ACF theory renders itself vulnerable in times of policy change occurs yet exogenous factors have not changed belief systems.

 In the previous examples of climate change, extreme weather conditions and the assumed consequences of environmental damage have not had significant impact on those policy makers who are ‘climate sceptics.’ Their policy core has by no means been changed or modified as a whole, even though empirical elements of climate change evidence has changed gradually over the last four decades. There is no suggested alternative to the ACF if and when policy core is not changed, thus placing insufficient emphasis on the importance of the variation and content of decision making belief systems.

A further critique of ACF is its failure to look at the impact of interests and individual choices in policy making process. There is no advancement of the rational actor model and Sabatier’s ideas focus wholly on groups of individuals collectively bargaining for a platform for their shared ideas and belief systems. Proposing that individual choice does not feature but that individuals are features of policy subsystem, the ACF perceptibly omits vital strategies of interest groups and coalition- formation.

Finally it is argued that the ACF is only applicable to western and developed countries. Sabatier himself admits this feature as it was originally developed using the Lake Tahoe case, with a largely American context in mind. Although Sabatier insists that since the ACF has been discovered, it has been applied well to a wide variety of policy areas outside of the US and Europe, the framework is still incomplete when assessing international policy areas such as climate change. It is not flexible enough to be readily transferred to developing nations, whom on the outset are most in need for positive environmental policy change. Climate change and environmental policy globally needs a framework or model which is easily adaptable worldwide and not specific only to localised environment issues. The causes of environmental politics, in the case if climate change, are global in origin and highly distributed across society.  Ideas in environmental policy based on ACF works successfully within developed countries but it is not as transient in aiding environmental policy formation transnationally.

As demonstrated so far ACF is an incomplete model for ideas in environmental policy. Therefore which model would best suit ideas in environmental policy making? It is now suggested that the ideational theory of epistemic communities is a far better fit to explain ideas in environmental policy making.

An epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy- relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area.

Epistemic communities consist of specific actors who carry certain ideas in to the policy making domain and use these ideas effectively by successfully engaging other decision making actors who share common casual and normative beliefs. They are frequently called upon to influence and research an area of policy which they are suitably informed upon. The most common usage of the term is a group of scientists forming a community of specialised experts who can legitimately propose solutions to international problems, such as the environment and climate change. This is according to Haas a major difference between ACF and epistemic communities that the latter model is knowledge based theory rather than value-based.  Haas suggests there need not be a constrained choice between ideas and interests, but actually the two paradigms can actively work together to form a much more cohesive model, in that which is found in epistemic communities.

Causal mechanisms influence policy pathways in times of increased uncertainty policy makers will turn to epistemic communities to elucidate the cause and effect relationships, provide information about the likely impact of an adopted policy, help define the self- interests of political actors and help formulate policy. Key locations where members of epistemic communities could gain significant leverage is within think tanks and research institutions, which is ideal for climate change as the issue is shrouded in complexity and is inseparable from complicated scientific evidence.

Epistemic communities have been useful when looking at the case for banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) in 1987 where the successful co-ordination of national and international policies to protect the ozone layer was influenced by the activities of an ecological epistemic community. The Rowland- Molina hypothesis in 1974 was largely ignored until a group of actors including atmospheric scientists and expert researchers in environment and science, shared common validity tests with sympathetic policy makers This dominant epistemic community shared the same causal beliefs which implied a link between CFC production and the depletion of the ozone layer and successfully propagated the idea with the adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987. The epistemic community were the only competent scientific group which contributed to the timing and stringency of CFC regulations.  Through a combination of strategies ranging from dissemination of technical information, persuasion of individuals and groups to the capture of various decision- making channel, this group of actors successfully infiltrated the policy making process..

Though these actors’ political beliefs or principled beliefs are different, they shared notions of validity and shared enterprise. Haas demonstrates that epistemic communities share both causal and principled beliefs as well as sharing both knowledge base and interests. This will inevitably lead to epistemic communities being more politically empowered and they become entrenched in political systems and government frameworks. The relationship becomes reciprocal as political policy ideas may already be developed but engaging with epistemic communities gives already defined policy ideas more credibility. This is an issue with epistemic communities which Patterson (1996) has identified to be a limitation, although Haas prefers to decipher this political relationship as epistemic community’s ability to help governments interpret emerging scientific consensus and articulate policies.

David Toke (1999) also lambasts Hass’ theory of epistemic communities for suggesting that scientists are the sole informants for environmental policy making and interest groups play a less important role in mobilising global support and influencing policy. Haas seems to claim that epistemic communities are superior to social movements such as Greenpeace, even though these NGO’s often commission scientists to produce work on their behalf in order to take to the policy table.  Hass argues that the ACF model is unclear about what outcomes are likely to be other than formation of short- term policy coalitions, when members of international government and non-governmental bodies interact.

Epistemic communities allow for empirical research focussing attention on the impact of scientific knowledge on international co-operation processes. Adler (1992) claims that epistemic communities play roles in international co-operation in fields characterised by technical uncertainty and complexity. These transnational networks mobilise and frame information and convince powerful actors, such as the World Bank and US government, to press nation states to adopt accepted environmental policies. This demonstrates the ability epistemic communities possess to transcend international borders and act globally, not just in national issues in the case of ACF. This attribute is imperative in environmental policy making if the policy is to affect global environment, such as the active actors of the UN’s IPCC group. However, if environmental policy is to focus on only on national and localised issue, then Hass’ ACF model as used in Lake Tahoe fits the policy call suitably.

In conclusion, ACF theory cannot explain the role of ideas in environmental policy making completely.

The fundamental core belief is non-negotiable but it is the policy core that can be, subject only to exogenous shocks, influenced and changes the course of policy maker’s ideas through the formation of coalitions. However when change does occurs, irrespective of external influences, the ACF struggles to explain this new policy path.

The theory aligns itself too closely to policy network theory and accentuates a descriptive model rather than casual without ever showing how changes of ideas occur.  ACF is a good model to study decision making processes and how coalitions interact to determine a policy change, but in more national environmental causes and not sufficiently in global environmental policy making. To use ACF to explain a worldwide environmental policy which will affect political systems, actors and population globally, is too premature.  

A more functional model is epistemic communities, which offer a more complete, intuitive and legitimate theory of how ideas are juxtaposed throughout the policy process. It offers the most plausible and solid account for environmental politics, internationally, than the limiting factors of the ACF. It is also acknowledged that a rarefied view of science and reliance upon elites whom possess scientific expertise is serving to conspicuously omit other credible actors from epistemic community theory. These limitations however are far less than those that are found within ACF.

Providing there is greater flexibility in the epistemic communities structure together with supplementing ideas from the ACF, the new fused model would allow greater acknowledgement that belief systems are vital and the reality that interest groups contract out epistemic community experts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campbell, J (2002), ‘Ideas, Politics, and Public Policy’, American Review of Sociology VOL 28 

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