Self-interest within the Advocacy Coalition Framework: how material beliefs affect change in German munitions policy
研究了物质信念（如经济利益和政治权力）如何影响德国二战遗留海底弹药政策的变迁，发现物质信念与目的信念的结盟推动了政策变化，挑战了倡导联盟框架的原有假设。
We use the concept of material beliefs to integrate self-interest into the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), providing new insights into collaboration between actors with material and purposive beliefs and transitions between subsystem types. Focusing on policy regarding the 1.6 million tons of sea-dumped munitions from the Second World War in German seas, which pose significant environmental and safety challenges, we applied a qualitative mixed-methods approach, combining interviews with desk reviews. Our findings reveal that material beliefs, such as financial profit and political power, initially sustained policy stasis within a unitary subsystem. A decade later, material beliefs enabled policy change, when aligned with purposive beliefs like environmental protection and long-term societal benefits. Contrary to the ACF hypothesis that purposive actors are more constrained in expressing beliefs, we find that both actor types are more constrained when expressing beliefs of their belief type and more flexible when expressing beliefs of the other. We demonstrate that entrepreneurs leveraged the differing incentives, rooted in actors’ deep core beliefs, to align policy core beliefs and foster collaboration. The alignment reflected asymmetric policy learning: material coalitions revised their policy core beliefs in response to shifting opportunities, while the purposive coalition adjusted secondary beliefs, suggesting greater stability but lower flexibility. Our findings challenge the ACF assumption that collaborative subsystems develop only when opposing coalitions collaborate with each other. We demonstrate an alternative theoretical pathway, in which collaboration emerges through the dissolution of one coalition, the participation of new actors, and the alignment of beliefs across coalitions.