Linking Coalition Strategies to Policy Change: A Comparative Study of Oil and Gas Policy Subsystems in Ghana and Nigeria

A key theme in policy process research is to explain policy change, which means alterations to public policy. Current research posits that diverse policy actors come together and devise strategies to exploit windows of opportunity to influence policy change. Yet the literature faces several limitations. Most analyses lack formal hypothesis tests and fail to explicitly connect policy actors’ strategies to policy change; this weakens the explanatory power of causal analysis. Furthermore, past work relies extensively on single case studies that hamper comparative analysis and generalizable knowledge. Focusing on Ghana and Nigeria, this study lessens these limitations by using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to develop and tests four policy change hypotheses on advocacy coalitions, negotiated agreement, internal and external perturbations, and policy-oriented learning. The study uses semi-structured interviews to collect data from 86 purposively selected participants. News media data (2007-2020) and scientific reports on oil and gas policy are used to supplement interview data. Using theory-testing process tracing, preliminary results suggests that coalition formation, and internal and external perturbations are necessary conditions for policy change in both countries. These conditions are linked to three key strategies that policy actors used to influence policy change: lobbying, reference to scientific information, and participating in public meetings. The study contributes to the literature by offering rigorous, causal explanations to policy change and advancing comparative analysis. The implications of these findings are discussed.