The advocacy coalition framework

This chapter reviews the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), analysing its account of how ideas transform policy advocacy, sometimes leading to coalescence of opposed forces. It argues that the ACF is a largely descriptive account of belief formation and how those beliefs input into policy change. It examines the hypotheses generated from the ACF and uses the inversion strategy to suggest that most are relatively trivial yet there is a paucity of empirical confirmation. The ACF largely produces proximate descriptions of policy change through historical examination of token cases. This type of informed, qualitative and detailed historical analysis is vital to our understanding of policy change.