Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T13:09:27.229Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Putting Ideas in Their Place: A Response to “Learning and Change in the British Columbia Forest Policy Sector”*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

George Hoberg
George Hoberg
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Ken Lertzman, Jeremy Rayner and Jeremy Wilson provide an idea-based approach to explaining changes in British Columbia's forest policy by applying the concept of learning developed by Paul Sabatier as part of his “advocacy coalition framework.” This effort to highlight the importance of ideas and learning is a welcome development in Canadian policy studies. But a word of caution is in order as well, because the article has some indications of slipping into a disconcerting pattern in the development of our discipline. For periods of time we seem to single out one significant variable and pay an inordinate amount of attention to it, the most striking examples being interest groups in the 1950s and 1960s and institutions in the 1980s. As we seize upon the new variable, we discredit the previous generation of scholars who we claim (sometimes misleadingly) ignored it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 135 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Lertzman, Ken, Rayner, Jeremy and Wilson, Jeremy, “Learning and Change in the British Columbia Forest Policy Sector: A Consideration of Sabatier's Advocacy Coalition Framework,” this Journal 29 (1996), 111–33.Google Scholar The most recent and comprehensive presentation of Sabatier's framework can be found in Sabatier, Paul and Jenkins-Smith, Hans, eds., Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993Google Scholar).

2 Recent work emphasizing the role of ideas includes Jenson, Jane, “Paradigms and Political Discourse: Protective Legislation in France and the United States before 1914,” this Journal 22 (1989), 235–58Google Scholar; Hall, Peter, “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain,” Comparative Politics 25 (1993), 275–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baumgartner, Frank and Jones, Bryan, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993Google Scholar); Goldstein, Judith and Keohane, Robert O., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993Google Scholar); and Goldstein, Judith, Ideas, Interests, and American Trade Policies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993Google Scholar). In the international relations field, knowledge-based ideas have received increasing prominence through the influential work of Peter Haas. See, for example, Haas, Peter, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46 (1992), 1–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 This tendency is emphasized by Garson, G. David, Group Theories of Politics (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978Google Scholar); and, more recently, by Almond, Gabriel, “The Return to the State,” American Political Science Review 82 (1988), 853–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Ibid.

5 Indeed, I have argued for the relevance of ideas in several publications. See Hoberg, George, Pluralism by Design (New York: Praeger, 1992Google Scholar); Hoberg, George, “Environmental Policy: Alternative Styles,” in Atkinson, Michael, ed., Governing Canada (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993Google Scholar); and Hoberg, George and Harrison, Kathryn, “It's Not Easy Being Green: The Politics of Canada's Green Plan,” Canadian Public Policy 20 (1994), 119–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For the concept of lesson drawing, see Bennett, Colin and Howlett, Michael, “The Lessons of Learning: Reconciling Theories of Policy Learning and Policy Change,” Policy Sciences 25 (1992), 275–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the concept of policy paradigms, see Hall, “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State.”

7 The source of this problem appears to be a mischaracterization of one of Sabatier's central conclusions (discussed in more detail later): “The basic argument of this framework is that, although policy-oriented learning is an important aspect of policy change and can often alter secondary aspects of a coalition's belief system, changes in the core aspects of a policy are usually the results of perturbations in noncognitive factors external to the subsystem, such as macroeconomic conditions or the rise of a new system governing coalition” (Sabatier, “Policy Change over a Decade or More,” in Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, eds., Policy Change and Learning, 19–20, emphasis added). The authors appear to confuse “core aspects of a policy”—an indicator of policy content—and “core beliefs” of coalition actors (see also 22).

8 Ibid., 25–26.

9 Ibid., 18–19.

10 For full quotation, see ibid., 19–20.

11 Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy, 6, emphasis in original.

12 The following interest-based explanation, and its comparison to the idea-based explanation, should not be taken as deliberately excluding the role of institutions. New institutions, particularly the Commission on Resources and the Environment created in 1992, have been central to policy change in BC forest policy. Institutions are not treated here both for reasons of space and the fact that their inclusion would not change the basic argument for the dominant importance of interests in driving policy change.

13 Compare Niskanen, William, Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971Google Scholar), with Wilson, James Q., Bureaucracy (New York: Basic Books, 1989Google Scholar).

14 Blake, Donald E., Carty, R. Kennet and Erickson, Lynda, Grassroots Politicians (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993), 63–64.Google Scholar

15 Stanbury, W. T., Vertinsky, I. B. and Wilson, Bill, The Challenge to Canadian Forest Products in Europe: Managing a Complex Environmental Issue, FEPA Working Paper 211 (Vancouver: Forest Economics and Policy Analysis Project, December 1994Google Scholar).

16 One of the most promising, Goldstein and Keohane's volume Ideas and Foreign Policy, sets out three causal pathways: ideas serve “road maps,” where shared causal assumptions or principled beliefs constrain choices; ideas influence outcomes in the absence of no unique equilibrium; and ideas become embedded in institutions.