Using Cultural Theory to Specify the Policy Actors, Belief Systems, and Sources of Coalition, Conflict, Stability, and Change in Policy Advocacy Coalitions and Environmental Resource Policies
2025-09-12
We use grid‐group cultural theory (CT) to specify underspecified aspects of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). Our theoretical synthesis of CT and the ACF provides, first, an exhaustive typology of policy actors and their cultural cognitive biases that entail, guide, and constrain policy core beliefs about problem definitions and solutions. Second, linking CT and the ACF allows us to conceptualize further the cognitive mechanisms for strategic cross‐cultural alliances between coalitions, which are enabled through specific shared or complementary core beliefs. Third, our synthesis explains how cultural policy actors shift coalitions to take advantage of issues triggered by external and internal disruptive events that make major policy change possible. Fourth, CT helps specify the mechanisms, possibilities, and limits of policy learning in the ACF based on CT's theory of cultural cognitive surprises, which aligns with the ACF's main knowledge‐based arguments. Fifth, we suggest how CT can be used to characterize the institutional venues in which cultural policy advocacy coalitions operate and how coalitions and their strategic alliances link to those venues and policy change. Our contribution is primarily theoretical, an analytical essay suggesting how CT concepts can be used to advance ACF theory and studies. However, to help establish the plausibility of our approach and to provide guidance on how to operationalize CT concepts in ACF studies, we also review 89 ACF policy studies covering 128 cases of environmental resource policymaking from 1987 to 2021 and interpret their main findings via our CT‐informed development of new ACF propositions.