Lessons from the Advocacy Coalition Framework for climate change policy and politics

The world faces grand challenges that threaten our socio-economical, ecological, and political systems. Inequities, insurrections, invasions, and illiberal democracies represent a sample of the population of problems facing life as we know it. Paramount among these problems lie climate change, caused principally by human activity of burning fossil fuels. This paper offers a perspective on climate change from a “lens” in the social sciences. By analyzing applications (n = 67) of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to climate change, we aim to examine patterns across these applications of the ACF, particularly concerning the characteristics of coalitions, how they behave, change policy, and learn. We conclude that future studies should examine how coalitions and beliefs can better address wicked problems in an increasingly global and interconnected world. We propose the prioritization of studying non-democratic governance arrangements and underrepresented locations of study, pairing the ACF with other theories and frameworks to address complex questions, and prioritizing normative dynamics of climate change politics.