Collaborative climate governance: linking consensus-building and collective action 

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By Cheng Zhou and Clare Richardson-Barlow 

This article develops a new framework for understanding how collaboration between governments and enterprises evolves in climate governance. The analysis connects two processes that are often studied separately: the development of consensus among stakeholders and the emergence of collective action to address climate change.  

Collaborative governance has become an increasingly important approach to addressing complex policy challenges such as climate change. These issues typically require cooperation between multiple actors, including governments, firms, and other organisations. While existing frameworks explain many institutional features of collaboration, they often pay less attention to how collaborative behaviour develops between participants over time. 

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Advocacy Coalition Framework, self-interest and policy change in German munitions policy

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by Alexander Pechmann & Jochen Hinkel


In their recent article Self-interest within the Advocacy Coalition Framework: how material beliefs affect change in German munitions policy, authors Alexander Pechmann and Jochen Hinkel, examine how self-interest shapes coalition dynamics and policy change. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), the authors introduce the concept of material beliefs to better explain how actors motivated by self-interest interact with those driven by broader societal goals.  

The article addresses a longstanding critique of the ACF. While the framework recognises that policy actors may be motivated by both societal goals and self-interest, empirical studies often focus primarily on purposive beliefs—those linked to wider societal objectives such as environmental protection or public health. Pechmann and Hinkel argue that this emphasis risks overlooking how actors’ material interests—such as financial gain or political influence—shape coalition behaviour and policy outcomes. 

To address this gap, the authors conceptualise material beliefs as beliefs oriented towards short-term benefits for the actor or their affiliated group, while purposive beliefs concern longer-term goals that benefit society more broadly. By integrating material beliefs directly into the ACF belief hierarchy, the article offers a clearer framework for analysing how self-interest operates within policy subsystems. 

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Stories told before: intertextuality in policy narratives on men’s violence against women 

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By Hilda Broqvist 

This article introduces the concept of intertextuality to the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), offering a new way to analyse how policy narratives draw on and reuse earlier stories. It argues that, while NPF research has paid close attention to how evidence is used strategically in policy debates, it has largely overlooked the fact that some forms of “evidence” are themselves narratives, complete with their own characters, plots and policy messages. 

The article starts from a simple but important observation: policy actors rarely construct narratives in a vacuum. Instead, they operate in discursive environments already populated by influential texts — such as national strategies, international conventions, or previous policy programmes — that shape how new stories are told. Drawing on theories of intertextuality from discourse analysis, Broqvist proposes that NPF scholars need better tools to study how these pre-existing narratives are actively incorporated into new policy narratives. 

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Policy & Politics announces the winners of the Early Career and Best Paper Prizes published in 2025

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We are delighted to announce our annual prize winners from all articles published in Policy & Politics in 2025.

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Advice from Policy & Politics journal on how to choose the right journal for your research 

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by Kristin Taylor (co-editor), Elizabeth Koebele (co-editor) & Allegra Fullerton (Digital Associate Editor) 

At the recent journal editors’ roundtable at the Conference on Policy Process Research in January 2026 in Bern, Switzerland, we were struck by the number of scholars seeking advice on how to choose the best journal to publish their research in. So, we thought we’d follow up with our top tips on choosing where to publish. Ultimately, the choice of whether a paper is accepted for review or not is at the discretion of the editorial team; however, there are ways to increase your odds of your work being selected to go under review, whether at Policy & Politics or elsewhere.  

Firstly, check if your paper aligns within the aims and scope of the journal you are considering. Astonishingly, Policy & Politics desk rejects around 75% of submissions every year primarily due to their lack of fit with our aims and scope. Such rejections are largely avoidable by rigorously reading journal aims, scope, and other summaries or editorial statements on journals’ webpages. It is also worth reviewing the last several months of publications from the journal. Your submission may be more likely to be sent out for review if it engages in or extends an ongoing discourse in the journal, including pointing to areas that need further attention. Journals track debates on issues within their scope over time, so if your research questions are responding to a debate already ongoing in the journal – partly indicated through citations of appropriate articles in your references – you stand a much better chance of your article passing the desk reject stage. 

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Evidence use in pesticide policymaking

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by Ueli Reber, Karin Ingold and Christian Stamm

Swiss lawmakers have debated pesticide regulation for nearly a decade, often drawing on different types of scientific and policy evidence to support their positions. In Reber et al.’s recent study, the authors analyse how problemoriented evidence (highlighting environmental or health risks) and solutionoriented evidence (emphasising policy effectiveness) were used strategically in parliamentary discussions. 

Analysing parliamentary texts with computational methods 
To study this, the authors compiled a corpus of 1,738 parliamentary documents — including written requests and plenary debate transcripts — containing references to pesticides. Using keyword searches, they retrieved 10,642 paragraphs. They then applied finetuned transformerbased text classification models to each paragraph to classify (1) the position expressed — either in favour of policy change (“change”) or defending existing policy (“status quo”) — and (2) whether the paragraph invoked evidence, and if so whether that evidence was problemoriented (highlighting risks) or solutionoriented (emphasising the effectiveness or sufficiency of existing or alternative policy measures). 

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Calibration in Policy Design: Rethinking Targets of Energy Efficiency Rebates

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By Ryan P. Scott, Chris M. Messer, Adam Mayer and Tami C. Bond 


In this article, the authors explore the concept of calibration in policy design, highlighting how policymakers adjust the scope and design policy interventions to match political, social, and administrative realities. Building on previous work, the authors argue that policies designed with multiple targets might have mechanisms of change quite different from the obvious mechanism of the most visible policy instrument. 

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How Policy Narratives Shape Sustainability Governance: A Case Study of Urban Transport Policy Discourse 

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This article investigates how policy narratives shape sustainability governance, by examining sustainability imaginaries and macrolevel narratives in urban transport policy through the lens of the Narrative Policy Framework. It examines how sustainability policy is shaped not only by institutions and interests, but by the stories actors tell about the future. Focusing on sustainability governance, it argues that policy processes are structured by competing macrolevel narratives that articulate different understandings of what sustainability means and how it should be pursued. 

The article brings together two bodies of scholarship that are often treated separately: sustainability science-based research on sustainable imaginaries, and policy process theory, particularly the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). Sustainability, the authors argue, is inherently normative and future-oriented. It begins as a vision of a desirable future before being translated into policy action, and these visions are continually reworked through policy discourse. 

Building on work by Adloff and Neckels, the authors conceptualise three ideal-typical sustainability trajectories — modernization, transformation and control — and translate them into sustainability policy paradigms. Drawing on Stauffer’s account of macrolevel narratives as policy paradigms “in story form”, they show how each paradigm is underpinned by distinct cultural and institutional narratives. 

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Annual call for special issue proposals for Policy & Politics 

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The editors of Policy & Politics invite proposals for a special issue that will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the nexus of public policy and politics. 

Proposals submission deadline: 30 April 2026 

Policy & Politics has been publishing innovative works at the intersection of public policy and politics for over 50 years. It is a world-leading, top quartile journal that is committed to advancing scholarly understanding of the dynamics of policy-making and implementation. By exploring the interplay between political actors, governing institutions and policy issues, the journal contributes to building policy process theory; and by reflecting on the evolving context in which these interactions occur, it provides timely and fresh insights into the influence of politics on policy and vice versa. 

The journal’s co-editors invite proposals for a special issue to be published online and in print that will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the nexus of public policy and politics. The journal only has space to publish one special issue each year, so this is a competitive process.  

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Quarterly highlights collection: policy evidence, institutional capacity and the limits of state action

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by Sarah Brown & Allegra Fullerton


This quarter’s highlights collection brings together three of Policy & Politics’ most read open access articles of 2025. Taken together, they speak to a shared concern at the heart of contemporary policy scholarship: how governments define, authorise and act on evidence under conditions of institutional constraint, political short-termism and contested authority. Each article examines a different moment in the policy process — from the mobilisation of lived experience, to the organisation of state capacity, to the formal enactment (and non-enactment) of law — offering complementary insights into why policy ambition so often falters in practice. 

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