Advancing policy scholarship: Quarterly highlights from Policy & Politics

By Allegra Fullerton & Sarah Brown

Policy scholarship continues to evolve in response to increasingly complex public challenges. As policy researchers seek to better understand how governments collaborate, use expertise and navigate contested policy processes, they are also refining the theories, concepts and methods that underpin the field itself. This quarterly collection brings together five recent articles from Policy & Politics that each advance policy scholarship in different ways. Together, they demonstrate how theoretical development, methodological innovation and empirical research can deepen our understanding of policy making.

Our first featured article, A new framework for collaborative climate governance: linking consensus building and collective action, by Cheng Zhou and Clare Richardson-Barlow, addresses one of the central questions in collaborative governance: how does collaboration move from dialogue to meaningful collective action? Drawing on extensive fieldwork and evolutionary game modelling, the authors develop a new framework that conceptualises collaboration as a dynamic process in which consensus building lays the foundations for joint action. By focusing on the behavioural dynamics that shape collaboration, the article offers a more process-oriented understanding of how governance arrangements develop and why collaborative efforts can produce very different outcomes across policy contexts.

Remaining with the theme of collaborative governance, Jacob Torfing, Reza Payandeh, Seyed Mostafa Jalili and Masoud Banafi turn attention to a feature often regarded as a barrier to collaboration but which may also be a source of learning and innovation. In A systematic review of conflict within collaborative governance, they synthesise evidence from across the literature to examine where conflicts emerge, how they are managed and what they mean for collaborative outcomes. Rather than treating disagreement simply as something to be overcome, the review shows how constructive conflict can strengthen collaboration when supported by effective leadership, dialogue and institutional design.

Questions of expertise and evidence remain equally central to policy making. In Why did the influence of experts erode during the COVID-19 pandemic?, Antoine Claude Lemor, María Alejandra Costa, Louis-Robert Beaulieu-Guay and Éric Montpetit explore how the influence of expert projections changed over the course of the pandemic. Their analysis suggests that while scientific projections can have considerable influence during the early stages of a crisis, that influence may diminish over time as public support evolves and policy makers increasingly respond to wider political and social pressures. In doing so, the article offers important insights into the changing relationship between expertise, public opinion and policy decisions during prolonged crises.

Alongside these empirical contributions, recent work in Policy & Politics is also extending the conceptual foundations of policy process theory. In Extending the Advocacy Coalition Framework: measuring within-coalition belief variation in offshore wind policy conflicts, Aerang Nam introduces original measures of belief variety and belief intensity that provide researchers with new tools for analysing coalition dynamics and policy conflict. Complementing this contribution, Alexander Pechmann and Jochen Hinkel’s Self-interest within the Advocacy Coalition Framework: how material beliefs affect change in German munitions policy broadens the framework by integrating material beliefs and self-interest into coalition analysis. In doing so, the authors challenge established assumptions about how collaboration emerges between advocacy coalitions and demonstrate how extending the framework with new concepts can generate fresh theoretical insights into policy change. Together, these articles illustrate how established policy process theories continue to evolve through both conceptual innovation and methodological refinement.

Collectively, these articles illustrate the continued development of policy scholarship across theory, methodology and empirical research. Whether proposing new frameworks for collaborative governance, rethinking the role of expertise, or extending influential theories and frameworks, each offers fresh perspectives that will be of interest to researchers seeking to understand the complexities of policy making.

We hope you enjoy this collection, curated by our editorial team as standout articles that advance policy scholarship, and find it useful for your own research and teaching. As always, we welcome your feedback and look forward to hearing from you.

The five articles featured in this collection are free to access from September through November 2026, so download them while you can!