The UNFCCC promotes inclusiveness of forest-based climate change mitigation policy processes (UNFCCC, 2011). In these processes, actors’ “beliefs are generators of policy change” (Knoke and Kostiuchenko, 2016: 101) for beliefs underly interests, and shared beliefs are determinants for collaboration and for Policy choice (Hajer and Versteeg, 2005; Di Gregorio, 2012: Di Gregorio et al. 2017). Likewise, actors’ stances influences national policy processes to achieve reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) within tropical countries (Brockhaus et al. 2014), including in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, 2012; Mpoyi et al. 2013). However, actors have a multitude of ideas and beliefs about the relevance of their respective roles and of the policy options that align with their interests. Their considerations of what options are the most appropriate to ensure effective and equitable REDD+ play a role in the way they chose to cooperate through advocacy coalitions within policy networks to achieve their individual or collective goals. By investigating actors’ advocacy coalitions within REDD+ policy networks in the DRC, this study attempts to understand how their ideas and beliefs affect collective action in the REDD+ policy domain. Specifically, the analysis addresses three questions. Firstly, what are actors’ ideas and beliefs regarding REDD+ options in the DRC? Secondly, which actors are sharing the same stances and rationales and what coalitions have formed? Thirdly, how do these shared and contrasting beliefs affect collaboration within policy networks to achieve policy outcomes.
The analysis is based on a set of stances indicating beliefs and policy network data collected on site in DRC and online, between February 2023 and January 2024 from 82 respondents representing 64 governmental and nongovernmental national and international organizations of the DRC REDD+ policy domain. The paper applies an advocacy coalition framework to the study of forest-based climate change mitigation in the country with the largest tropical forest resources of Africa.
