Comparative Strategic Behavior of Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Brokers: The Case of Kenya’s Biosafety Regulatory Policy

Abstract

This paper sheds some light on the behavior and effect of advocacy coalitions and policy brokers in a quest to manage collective action problems in Kenya’s biosafety policy process between 1990 and 2011. The analysis demonstrates that formation of coordination structures was one way of solving collective action problems while the resulting coordination patterns were instrumental in characterizing the competing coalitions. An important finding of this study is that strategic actions of these structures were linked to the “devil shift” situation and conflict escalation. This necessitated the intervention of an administrative government agency that negotiated a win–win policy compromise as a policy broker. The dynamic activities of the coalitions and the broker were linked to useful policy learning. The examination of insights drawn from this case study enriches our understanding of the under-researched behavior of coalitions and the policy broker elements of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF).