Conceptualizing and Measuring Drivers of Policy Change in Urban Water Governance

Abstract

This dissertation conceptualizes and measures key drivers of policy change articulated in the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). The ACF is a widely-used framework that has guided researchers worldwide in their efforts to find answers to leading policy puzzles. Analysts have continued to improve the framework over the past three decades, but there is still room for theoretical and methodological development. With better clarification of concepts and measurement, scholars can gain better traction in offering theoretical contributions in the ACF’s research program. This work presents three studies that contribute to the objective of advancing the ACF. The first study investigates how narratives in gray literature highlight important actors in the policy network, and how well this aligns with centrality measures in the network structure. The second discusses ways to conceptualize environmental shocks, and examines how these affect change in the structure of a policy coordination network over time. Finally, the third study assesses the validity of gray literature data used for the first two studies by correlating coordination networks of policy actors detected through analysis of gray literature and survey methods. These efforts collectively offer novel ways to improve the clarity of concepts in the ACF, as well as the framework’s utility for empirical studies across a variety of policy domains and geographic settings.