The world faces grand challenges that threaten our socio-economical, ecological, and political systems. Inequities, insurrections, invasions, and illiberal democracies represent a sample of the population of problems facing life as we know it. Paramount among these problems lie climate change, caused principally by human activity of burning fossil fuels. This paper offers a perspective on climate change from a “lens” in the social sciences. By analyzing applications (n = 67) of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to climate change, we aim to examine patterns across these applications of the ACF, particularly concerning the characteristics of coalitions, how they behave, change policy, and learn. We conclude that future studies should examine how coalitions and beliefs can better address wicked problems in an increasingly global and interconnected world. We propose the prioritization of studying non-democratic governance arrangements and underrepresented locations of study, pairing the ACF with other theories and frameworks to address complex questions, and prioritizing normative dynamics of climate change politics.

This study explores the structure of advocacy coalitions and frames over time in South Korea's adversarial nuclear energy policy subsystem. It relies on the Advocacy Coalition Frameworks and Discourse Network Analysis to guide data collection from 1149 policy statements in 502 newspaper articles of South Korea spanning four years. Using E‐I Index, modularity index, and coalition polarization for data analysis, it finds an alignment of advocacy coalitions with increasing polarization through external events and the ongoing adaptation of frames to these events. The findings contribute insights into the characteristics of distinct, stable, and polarized coalitions and their frames in the high‐conflicted policy areas in tumultuous times in the context of non‐Western countries.

In disputes over public policy, public debates often hinge on the argument involving policy knowledge. One approach for studying policy knowledge is the Advocacy Coalition Framework, which theorizes that advocacy coalitions form around coherent beliefs partly about policy knowledge and invest in policy knowledge by working with expert allies. This article examines the role of academics, a type of expert, in discourse about South Korea's adversarial nuclear energy policy debates. Using Discourse Network Analyzer, we collect and analyze text from 502 South Korean newspaper articles from 2016 through 2019. We find that academics align with distinctive discourse involving policy knowledge in coalitions. However, we also show that there exist weak or inconsistent associations between some academics' centrality and the intensity of policy conflict. The findings contribute to understanding policy knowledge, the distinctive discourse of experts, and a systematic study of controversial policy making in a non‐Western country. Related Articles Heo, Inhye. 2022. “Energy Democratization Policy without Democratization of Policy Governance in South Korea: A Participatory Democracy Perspective.” Politics & Policy 50(4): 834–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12480. Lantis, Jeffrey S. 2019. “‘Winning’ and ‘Losing’ the Iran Nuclear Deal: How Advocacy Coalitions and Competition Shape U.S. Foreign Policy.” Politics & Policy 47(3): 464–505. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12299. Nowlin, Matthew C., Maren Trochmann, and Thomas M. Rabovsky. 2022. “Advocacy Coalitions and Political Control.” Politics & Policy 50(2): 201–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12458.