The role of expertise in policy development: Towards a De-carbonized British road transport Infrastructure

Abstract

Boundedly rational policy specialists simultaneously interact, learn and adapt their behaviour and the rules that guide them. Collective structures and norms incrementally change along the way. The research presented in this paper further investigates the possibility of a reciprocal causal relationship between the emergence of policy specialists’ generic understanding of a decision situation and the development of collective structures from a realist perspective. Of particular interest is how expertise on techno-scientific and ecological issues enters into and influences this process. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) guides the investigation. The ACF describes the ways in which fundamental policy core beliefs concerning strategies to deliver ontological axioms could lead to conflict, coordination and collective action. Furthermore the ACF explains how perturbations external to the system, and learning processes within the system, might change how individuals with an interest in the policy area perceive a decision situation and possibly alter the relations between them. The empirical work in this investigation develops on Dudley and Richardson’s ACF-based study of British road transport policy. Their study described the links between policy-oriented learning and change towards a more sustainable approach to road transport in the 1990s. This investigation is a longitudinal, record-based, micro-level study into how policy specialists, who share a common interest in the case, exchanged, utilized and readjusted their expertise over the period between January 1988 and December 2011. Social network analysis was used to identify case relevant specialists and the relational structure between them. The method to transcribe their policy core beliefs from archival records follows Axelrod (1976). Citations made verbally during policy development were recorded, to map and closely examine cases in which one individual evidently influenced the expertise of another.