Social and Political Dimensions of Forest Certification, 2003 PERSPECTIVES ON FOREST CERTIFICATION AS A POLICY PROCESS: REFLECTIONS ON ELLIOTT AND SCHLAEPFER`S USE OF THE ADVOCACY COALITION FRAMEWORK1

An array of natural scientific evidence indicates that the planet’s environmental health is under increasing and intense stress. As a result, one of the most important tasks facing social science research in the early 21st century is to understand better the processes through which environmentally sensitive policy choices are taken and encouraged. Recognition of this has led a great number of scholars, operating from a wide variety of theoretical approaches, frameworks, and epistemologies, to analyse the policy making process and how policy choices are made. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) developed by Paul Sabatier and colleagues (Sabatier 1999a; 1999b; Jenkins-Smith and Sabatier 1994; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Sabatier 1993) has been one such approach that has caught the attention of a number of scholars worldwide, and was used in the paper by Elliott and Schlaepfer. The ACF framework contains a number of specific hypotheses regarding policy change, but its key attraction is arguably because of two conceptualizations it makes. First, it argues that “subsystem ” or sectoral level policy making processes can be divided into two or more “advocacy ” coalitions attempting to influence policy choices. Each of the coalitions are united by belief systems, further distinguished between difficult to change “core ” beliefs and 1 I am grateful to Charlene Zietsma for identifying legitimacy literature within organization sociology. The researc