Putting Ideas in Their Place: A Response to “Learning and Change in the British Columbia Forest Policy Sector”

Abstract

Ken Lertzman, Jeremy Rayner and Jeremy Wilson provide an idea-based approach to explaining changes in British Columbia's forest policy by applying the concept of learning developed by Paul Sabatier as part of his “advocacy coalition framework.” This effort to highlight the importance of ideas and learning is a welcome development in Canadian policy studies. But a word of caution is in order as well, because the article has some indications of slipping into a disconcerting pattern in the development of our discipline. For periods of time we seem to single out one significant variable and pay an inordinate amount of attention to it, the most striking examples being interest groups in the 1950s and 1960s and institutions in the 1980s. As we seize upon the new variable, we discredit the previous generation of scholars who we claim (sometimes misleadingly) ignored it.