Publication: Las ideas en las políticas públicas: el enfoque de las coaliciones promotoras
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2005
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Abstract
One characteristic of the contemporary policy studies is to
consider that ideas play an independent role. The Advocacy Coalition
Framework is an attractive sample of this as it tries to explain policy change,
paying special attention to cognitive aspects: ideas, beliefs, values, learning,
knowledge…
However, the Advocacy Coalition Framework considers cognitive aspects as a
part of a more extensive framework that allows us to verify the real function
of the ideas through empirical analysis. It is very respectful with
methodological aspects and offers a theoretical framework that helps policy
analysis and political science to obtain a better understanding of the policy
complex processes.
The Advocacy Coalition Framework focuses on the study of policy change
based on three premises: a) understanding policy change and the role of
policy-oriented learning therein requires a time perspective of at least one
decade; b) it is important to study policy change through a focus on policy
subsystems (that is the interaction of those actors from public and private
organizations, and from different levels of government, who are actively
concerned with a policy problem or issue); c) public policies can be
conceptualized in the same manner than beliefs systems, that means as sets
of value priorities and causal assumptions about how to realize them.
Based on this, and regarding the difference between policy subsystem and
the global political system in which the subsystem is inserted, and between
the stable and dynamic parameters, policy change is considered the result of
several variables:
A) Relatively stable parameters: basic attributes of the problem area,
basic distribution of natural resources, essential sociocultural
values as well as social and constitutional structure;
B) Dynamic system events: changes in socio-economic conditions and
technology, changes in the systemic governing conditions, policy
decisions and impacts from other subsystems;
C) And the inner dynamic of the subsystem: the competitive interaction
of advocacy coalitions formed by those actors who share basic beliefs
and are sufficiently coordinated for changing rules, budgets,
etcetera, in order to achieve their aims through the time, or in other
words, to transfer their beliefs systems into public policies. We
concentrate our attention on this last group of factors, because they
include the cognitive aspects.
The basic argument of the Advocacy Coalition Framework is that, while
policy-oriented learning is an important aspect of policy change and can
often alter secondary aspects of a coalition’s belief system, changes in the
core aspects of a policy are usually the results of perturbations in noncognitive
external factors to the subsystem such as macro-economic
conditions or the rise of a new systemic governing coalition. This is because
to be able to translate their beliefs into public policies o programs, advocacy
coalitions need resources and opportunities and these mainly depend on not
cognitive parameters.
The Advocacy Coalition Framework makes possible the empirical study of
the beliefs systems by developing carefully their structure. And it
investigates the role of policy oriented learning through the analysis of
needed conditions to enable this learning in each individual, within an
advocacy coalition and between different coalitions. All these aspects are
based on a model of individual that emphasizes that people are not only
guided by their interests and that their conception of the world is deeply
affected by the limited human capacity to process and analyse information,
and by all the problems related with cognitive dissonance.
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Keywords
Policy analysis, Policy change, Advocacy coalition framework, Ideas, Beliefs system, Policy oriented learning, Análisis de políticas, Cambio de políticas, Marco de coaliciones promotoras, Ideas, Sistema de creencias, Aprendizaje orientado a las políticas públicas