Advocacy Coalition

Advancing policy scholarship: Quarterly highlights from Policy & Politics 

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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.

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How policy beliefs shape advocacy coalitions in energy policy  

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by Aerang Nam


In a recent article Extending the Advocacy Coalition Framework: Measuring Within-Coalition Belief Variation in Offshore Wind Policy Conflicts author Aerang Nam advances the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) by developing a more precise account of how belief expression varies within coalitions and how this variation is structured by organisational affiliation. Rather than treating beliefs as latent positions inferred from actor behaviour, the article shifts attention to observable expressions of belief in public discourse and how these expressions differ in both scope and intensity across actors within the same coalition space. 

Reconceptualising constraint in belief expression 

A central theoretical contribution lies in the reconceptualisation of constraint in belief expression. While ACF scholarship has long acknowledged that actors do not express beliefs in fully unconstrained ways, constraint is often treated in general or implicit terms. The article advances this debate by conceptualising constraint as measurable variation in the breadth and intensity of beliefs articulated by actors within coalitions. 

This reframing shifts analysis away from binary assumptions about whether belief expression is constrained and toward a more graded understanding of how it is constrained. In doing so, it strengthens the ACF’s capacity to analyse discourse in a way that is both theoretically consistent and empirically operationalisable. 

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