Climate Advocacy Coalitions in Guangdong, China

Abstract

This article applies a modified conceptual framework derived from Sabatier's advocacy coalition framework and Haas' epistemic communities' framework to analyze climate advocacy coalitions in Guangzhou, China, a largely unexplored area of study. Our analysis reveals several key features of the climate policy advocacy groups working to promote policy change within the policy subsystem of a nonpluralistic regime: (a) mutual interdependence (consensus building) in the creation of an advocacy coalition system, (b) government recognition and endorsement of newly established or professionally oriented coalition organizations, (c) coalition formation in a top-down manner rather than by accumulative bottom-up demands, and (d) bottom-up motivators, such as changing societal values and the external environment, which contribute to and accelerate the reform of policy orientation and the administrative structure of coalition formation.

There and Back Again: A Tale of the Advocacy Coalition Framework

“…This is followed by the United Kingdom (15) (e.g., Dudley, ), Switzerland (14) (e.g., Mavrot, ), and Sweden (10) (e.g., Sandström, ). Some examples of applications in more‐remote and less‐common countries include: Burkina Faso (Cherlet & Venot, ), Bulgaria (Brusis, ), China (Francesch‐Huidobro & Mai, ; Li, ), Estonia (Adams, Cotella, & Nunes, ), France (Bandelow & Kundolf, ), Greece (Stamelos & Kavasakalis, ), Iceland (Nedergaard, ), India (Rastogi, Hickey, Badola, & Hussain, ), Indonesia (Fidelman et al, ), Ireland (Adshead, ), Israel (Lahat, ; Mandelkern & Shalev, ), Kenya (Kingiri, ), Liberia (Runkle, LaFollette, & Alamu, ), Papua New Guinea (Babon et al, ), Portugal (Huntjens et al, ), South Africa (Hirschi & Widmer, ), and South Korea (Kim, ). Figure illustrates a total of 201 applications by country…”

“…Many policy process frameworks and theories are utilized in these applications including: punctuated equilibrium theory (e.g., Beard, ; Dziengel, ), multiple streams (e.g., Olsson, ; Van Gossum et al, ), network analysis (e.g., Ansell et al, ), regime theory (e.g., Blatter, ), narrative policy framework (e.g., Shanahan, McBeth, Hathaway, & Arnell, ), social construction and policy design (e.g., Weible, Siddiki, et al, ), diffusion of innovation (e.g., Amougou & Larson, ), and institutional analysis and development (e.g., Cheng, Danks, & Allred, ; Lansang, ). The ACF is often compared or integrated with various theories and theoretical concepts that stretch across policy, public administration, and political science including: resource dependence (e.g., Leifeld & Schneider, ), discourse coalitions (e.g., Leifeld, ; Szarka, ), agenda setting (e.g., Smith, ), policy paradigms (e.g., Quaglia, ), cultural theory (e.g., Nohrstedt, ), policy entrepreneur (e.g., Mann & Gennaio, ), epistemic communities (e.g., Francesch‐Huidobro & Mai, ), socio‐ecological systems (e.g., Weible et al, ), and stakeholder analysis (Weible, ). This demonstrates the flexibility of the framework to be inclusive or comparable with various theories and theoretical concepts.…”

The power of policy networks in authoritarian regimes: Changing environmental policy in China

“…To understand the construction and functioning of policy networks, I conducted several rounds of interviews with each interviewee, and attempted to interview each dyad of group leader and supervisory official. Although the small number of cases might raise questions of generalizability to CSOs working in other areas in China, and more broadly to other authoritarian regimes, other studies find supervisory agencies collaborating with CSOs (Francesch‐Huidobro & Mai, ; Han, Swedlow, & Unger, ; Lu, 2007; Wu, ). Although environmental CSOs seem to be at the forefront of establishing policy networks, other groups dealing with health and women's rights are using similar strategies (Hsu & Jiang, ; Teets, ; Thompson & Lu, ).…”

Collaborative governance and environmental authority for adaptive flood risk: recreating sustainable coastal cities

“…Hence, this paper adopts the broader and more elastic Weberian conceptualization of authority, which employs the rationality principle, procedural correctness, and a certain degree of voluntary compliance and social control through a shared belief system to define the legitimating principles of governance for regenerative sustainability (Francesch-Huidobro and Mai, 2012).…”