Mechanisms of Policy Change: A Proposal for a Synthetic Explanatory Framework

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, the theoretical debate on policy change in the field of policy studies has been clearly dominated by three major reference approaches – the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), the punctuated-equilibrium theory (PET), and the multiple streams approach (MS). Their success led the reference approaches to evolve separately without explicitly establishing communication across theoretical boundaries. This has greatly limited the advance of the debate in order to get a better understanding of policy change. The three reference approaches have proved to offer widely contrasting and accepted accounts of policy change. They also present a number of shortcomings which render partial the explanations and limit their applicability. Starting from the analysis of these points, this article is devoted to the main purpose of presenting a synthetic theoretical framework that both profits from the strengths and commonalities of the three reference approaches – by emphasizing the complementarity of the causal explanations they devise – and solves the detected problems – through providing a more precise specification of theoretical relationships among the conceptual elements of the framework.