Plus ça Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose? A review of Paul Sabatier’s “An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein”

Adam Wellstead ()
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Adam Wellstead: Michigan Technological University

Policy Sciences, 2017, vol. 50, issue 4, No 4, 549-561

Abstract: Abstract Paul Sabatier’s 1988 Policy Sciences paper, “An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein” (21:129–168), introduced the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) to the policy discipline. Over the past 30 years, the ACF has become a generalizable theory of policy change. Another feature is the ongoing critical self-assessment and revisions of the framework’s theoretical and empirical assumptions. As a result, there have been many reviews of the ACF. However, the popularity of Sabatier’s contribution and the most cited article in this journal is its wider significance beyond the ACF. A bibliometric analysis of 737 peer-reviewed publications citing this paper is undertaken. This is followed by a summary chronicling ACF reviews and scholarship comparing the ACF with other policy process theories and frameworks.

Keywords: Advocacy coalition framework; Bibliometric method; Causality; Policy change; Policy learning; Sabatier (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11077-017-9307-z

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