Foreign Policy Change from an Advocacy Coalition Framework Perspective

Abstract

Why does a state change its foreign policy objectives and who is responsible for instigating such change? According to Hermann, four primary change agents are central to this process: leaders, bureaucracies, changes in domestic constituencies, and external shocks. This paper argues that the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is a complementary policy process framework that can explain foreign policy change (FPC) and that accounts for all four of these primary change agents. Additionally, it is a broader framework of the policy process that facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing FPC than traditional FPC research. The ACF has the potential to broaden our understanding of FPC by emphasizing the intersection of the international system with domestic politics and focusing on a myriad of policy actors coordinating their advocacy efforts to influence FPC. To support this argument, the paper discusses how FPC can benefit from the ACF and reviews past applications. It proposes a research agenda using the ACF to study FPC and draws conclusions about future challenges and directions.

Grasping Foreign and Security Policy Change: Patterns and Conditions of Change Among Liberal Democracies

“…On the state level, a number of analyses suggest that domestic factors such as budgetary constraints (Brummer & Oppermann, 2021, p. 322), bureaucratic structures (Allison, 1971;Joly & Richter, 2019), and veto players (Oppermann & Brummer, 2018), for example, within coalitions (Kaarbo, 2017) or legislatures (Böller, 2022), matter for foreign policy decisions. Besides, changing governments , advocacy coalitions (Haar & Pierce, 2021), or ideologies of domestic actors (Merke et al, 2020) may also affect policies.…”

“…Against this backdrop, there is no shortage in the literature of IR and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) to investigate cases of major policy change. However, most of these studies focus on specific decisions or events, such as the end of the Cold War, 9/11, or, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic (see, i.a., Haar & Pierce, 2021;Hermann, 1990;Ziv, 2011). In addition, a substantial part of the literature deals with shifting patterns of foreign policy over time-yet, mostly regarding a circumscribed area of foreign policy, such as nuclear strategy or foreign aid, and, again, in single-country studies (see Haesebrouck & Joly, 2021a for an overview).…”

Methods of Foreign Policy Analysis

“…There have also been new handbooks focusing on the foreign policies of single countries, like Austria, Japan, and Russia, among others (McCarthy 2018;Tsygankov 2018;Senn, Eder, and Kornprobst 2022). Moreover, there have been recent initiatives to foster connections between FPA and other strands of research, including bridges toward ethnography (Hopf 2002;Neumann 2002Neumann , 2011Kuus 2013Kuus , 2014MacKay and Levin 2015;Cornut 2018), feminist theory (Hudson et al 2008;Aggestam and True 2020;Okundaye and Breuning 2021), public policy (Oppermann and Spencer 2016;Brummer et al 2019;Haar and Pierce 2021) and history (Brummer and Kießling 2019), as much as there has been new work on enduring topics such as foreign policy change (da Vinha 2017;Chryssogelos 2021;Joly and Haesebrouck 2021).…”

Non-governmental organizations coalition in influencing global agenda

“…An advocacy coalition is formed when a collection of actors shares a set of values and participate in significant collective activities (Henry et al 2014). Advocacy coalitions try to make a set of shared policy values and beliefs a reality by influencing the conduct of several government institutions over time (Haar & Pierce 2021).…”