Science, badgers, politics: advocacy coalitions and policy change in bovine tuberculosis policy in Britain

Badgers represent one of the most controversial and hotly debated environmental issues in modern Britain. This paper advances the study of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) by examining the limited extent to which extensive scientific research over a 15-year period changed the basic composition and argumentation of different advocacy coalitions in a highly adversarial setting. Based on coding of the media coverage over the period 1986-2013, this paper analyzes the composition of the advocacy coalitions, their stability over time, and the limited extent to which learning took place in response to scientific disputes. It also highlights how coalitions between actors with similar policy beliefs did not form, highlighting the importance of the ACF and other policy processes to consider dynamics that go beyond the individual subsystem under investigation.