material beliefs

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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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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