Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Policy networks are increasingly recognized to be an important component of the environmental policymaking process, and network analysis provides a useful set of conceptual tools and methods to rigorously investigate these influences. However, much of the policy literature to date has not directly engaged with the question of how individuals versus organizations matter within policy networks. Many policy studies conceptualize networks as a set of relations amongst organizations or broad stakeholder groups, while the attendant theory of network structure and function derives from models of individual decision-making. This provides an empirical simplification—unlike people, organizational membership within policy subsystems is generally stable over time, making the analysis of organizational networks far more tractable than the analysis of individual networks with highly stochastic boundaries.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) provides a platform for investigating these differences, and testing the strength of assumptions that individual behaviors may safely be aggregated to the level of organizations in empirical studies of environmental policy change. In particular, the ACF hypothesizes that: 1) the membership of individuals in a particular subsystem will remain stable over time; 2) individual actors will move primarily to organizations that share their core beliefs and values regarding policy, reinforcing within-coalition learning amongst organizations; and 3) the beliefs and networking behavior of individuals within an organization are relatively homogenous.

These hypotheses are tested through surveys of policy elites engaged in multiple U.S. environmental risk policy subsystems, including nuclear energy, natural hazards, and climate change. Longitudinal data on individual beliefs, networking behavior, and movements across organizations are drawn from three surveys conducted over a thirty-year period. Additionally, this research also investigates the degree to which policy subsystems—defined by a fixed geographic scope and substantive policy issue—overlap as a result of individuals moving across multiple organizations over time. In this way, individuals serve as a mechanism for learning across subsystems. Overall, this research paves the way for developing a more nuanced understanding of individual versus organizational roles in the environmental policy process.