Abstract
This article employs the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), a set of concepts developed to account for policymaking primarily in the United States, to analyze factors that led China to downsize its latest big hydropower project, on the Nu River. The ACF helps us identify two conflicting coalitions based on their policy beliefs and the resources they mobilized to translate their beliefs into policy change, which the ACF also helps us explain. Conflict between state agencies contributed to the rise of a societally based environmental coalition to oppose a state-centered development coalition, and struggle and strategic learning between these coalitions led to interventions by the premier and a scaling down of the project from 13 dams to four.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Chris Weible, Adam Douglas, Karin Ingold, and Daniel Nohrstedt for their helpful guidance; as well as participants in several webinar sessions hosted by the editors of the special issue for their insights; and Tam Mai for her research assistance.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Heejin Han
Heejin Han is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. She studies environmental politics with a regional focus on Asia.
Brendon Swedlow
Brendon Swedlow is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and founding faculty associate of the Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy at Northern Illinois University; a research associate of the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics; and a fellow of the Center for Governance at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research seeks to develop theory, concepts, methods, and evidence that advance the study of American politics, public law, public policy, and the politics of science.
Danny Unger
Danny Unger teaches comparative politics in the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University. In recent years most of his work has been on Thai politics.