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

Canadian Journal of Political Science

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 135-144

  Hoberg, George ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84970015015     PISSN: 00084239     EISSN: 17449324     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0008423900007277     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. This tendency is emphasized by G. David Garson, Group Theories of Politics (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978)
2. and, more recently, by Gabriel Almond, “The Return to the State,” American Political Science Review 82 (1988), 853–874.
3. Indeed, I have argued for the relevance of ideas in several publications. See George Hoberg, Pluralism by Design (New York: Praeger, 1992)
4. George Hoberg, “Environmental Policy: Alternative Styles,” in Michael Atkinson, ed. Governing Canada (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993)
5. and George Hoberg and Kathryn Harrison, “It's Not Easy Being Green: The Politics of Canada's Green Plan,” Canadian Public Policy 20 (1994), 119–137.
6. For the concept of lesson drawing, see Colin Bennett and Michael Howlett, “The Lessons of Learning: Reconciling Theories of Policy Learning and Policy Change,” Policy Sciences 25 (1992), 275–294.
7. For the concept of policy paradigms, see Hall, “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State.”
8. The source of this problem appears to be a mischaracterization of one of Saba-tier's central conclusions (discussed in more detail later): “The basic argument of this framework is that, although policy-oriented learning is an important aspect of policy change and can often alter secondary aspects of a coalition's belief system, changes in the core aspects of a policy are usually the results of perturbations in noncognitive factors external to the subsystem, such as macroeconomic conditions or the rise of a new system governing coalition” (Sabatier, “Policy Change over a Decade or More,” in Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, eds. Policy Change and Learning, 19–20, emphasis added). The authors appear to confuse “core aspects of a policy” —an indicator of policy content— and “core beliefs” of coalition actors (see also 22).
9. Compare William Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971)
10. with James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
11. Donald E. Blake, R. Kenneth Carty and Lynda Erickson, Grassroots Politicians (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993), 63–64.
12. W. T. Stanbury, I. B. Vertinsky and Bill Wilson, The Challenge to Canadian Forest Products in Europe: Managing a Complex Environmental Issue, FEPA Working Paper 211 (Vancouver: Forest Economics and Policy Analysis Project, December 1994).