Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper uses an explanatory puzzle, about which the policy process study has advanced contending hypotheses: why and how policy changed or culminated in status quo in the water resource policy subsystem. This paper answers this question by comparing and tracing eight causal mechanisms of policy change or status quo in water resource policymaking. Arguably, more research on the causal mechanisms of policy change is necessary and needs to be integrated across the policy study literature. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) guides this research and provides the hypothesis of necessary and/or sufficient causation to policy change. The method of process tracing was employed to test the hypothesis by examining the policy-making surrounding dam construction/removal within and between South Korea and the United States. I analyzed (1) who exploited events outside and inside of subsystems; (2) how their beliefs and preferences are formed; (3) how they choose their actions; and (4) how the individual actions of multiple actors are aggregated to produce the collective outcome per case. The findings provide insights into how and why policy changes or stay with the status quo. The main argument of this paper is that the combination of external events and internal perturbations are necessary sources for policy change across subsystems and countries. The occurrence of external shock, internal perturbation, or a combination thereof did not always lead to policy change when anti-policy change coalition with legal authority mediated them or another external shock significantly conducive to preserving the status quo occurred. Policy-oriented learning and negotiated agreement are sufficient sources of policy change. While the analysis found policy-oriented learning in all cases of policy change in the U.S., one South Korean case showed a possible pathway to policy change without the learning. Coalition opportunity structures such as consensus rule could be a decisive factor in internal perturbations which blocks the implementation of the agreement or which bypasses critical veto points. This comparative policy process study contributes to the theoretical advancement of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and its applicability to both pluralistic and semi-pluralistic political systems.