Why and How Does Policy Change over Time: a Narrative Explanation from Iran
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Why and How Does Policy Change over Time: a Narrative Explanation from Iran Hasan DanaeeFard 1 & Tayebeh Abbasi 2 Accepted: 6 October 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Over recent years, policy change explanation has grown into a topic of interest among scholars. Accordingly, various frameworks, theories, and models have been introduced to explain policy change through proposing different causal mechanisms to clarify policy change not necessarily aligned. This paper aimed to investigate the Act of Goals, Functions, and Structure of the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology (MSRT) in Iran as an important and radical policy change in the fields of science, research, and technology (SRT). Moreover, there were attempts to identify causes of policy change. This paper had contributions to practitioners and researchers studying in the fields of SRT as well as those involved in promoting policy change. Keywords Policy change . Public policy . Science . Research and technology area
Introduction Understanding policy change is one of the important topics in policy process literature, which has thus far attracted scholars’ attention to “Why and how policy change occurs?” and “Why some public issues remain unchanged for a long time or suddenly change dramatically?” (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Donnelly and Hogan 2012; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; McBeth et al. 2007; Pralle 2003; Mintrom and Norman 2009; Blomquist 2007; Heikkila et al. 2014; Gerring 2007). For this reason,
* Tayebeh Abbasi [email protected] Hasan DanaeeFard [email protected]
1
Department of Public Administration, the Faculty of Management and Economics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
2
Department of Public Administration, Management Faculty, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Fard H.D., Abbasi T.
most theoretical frameworks and numerous empirical studies have sought, in recent decades, to explain how policies change. Three of these prominent theoretical frameworks are the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) by Sabatier (1988), John Kingdon’s multiple-streams framework (MSF) (1993), and Baumgartner and Jones’ punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) (1993), offering important explanatory insights to policy change understanding. As a powerful theory, John Kingdon’s MSF (1993) elucidates policy change, especially agenda-setting theory. In view of that, there are three mostly independent processes i.e., a problem stream, a policy stream, and a politics stream, whose coupling produces dramatic changes. Policy entrepreneurs also play an active role in this respect (Schlager and Blomquist 1996). As well, the ACF developed by Sabatier (1988) underlines major actors and other elements in policy change process. Accordingly, policy change, occurring over a decade or more, represents a function of interactions between competing advocacy coalitions within a policy subsystem, consisting of actors from public and private organizations, actively concerned with a policy issue. It also changes perturb
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