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AbstractTo help explain the role scientists play in policy change, concepts such as coproduction, boundary‐work, and pollution and purity claims as they are used in science studies should be incorporated into policy theory. Moreover improved policy theory should specify the kinds of boundary‐work that can occur and the kinds of values and beliefs that drive boundary‐work, explaining how boundary‐work leads to policy change. The cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson, Aaron Wildavsky, and others can help specify conditions for coproduction and change in science, institutions, and policy when recast as a theory involving three critical institutional boundaries. This theory‐development article uses this recast version of CT to help explain the most recent dramatic shift in federal land and wildlife management policy in the Pacific Northwest. The article illustrates how cultural combatants use boundary‐work including pollution and purity claims to align themselves and the domain of authoritative science with scientists whose constructs of nature and policy prescriptions are functional for their preferred institutions.

Cultural Theory (CT) is a constructivist theory, developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others, that seeks to participate in the positivist project of discovering, explaining, and predicting regularities in human behavior. Special Issue contributions and this introduction suggest some ways in which this theory can help advance policy studies. One way CT can help is by further specifying other approaches to policy theory. Thus, Hank Jenkins‐Smith and his collaborators argue (and with respect to belief systems demonstrate) that the theory can be used to specify belief systems, coalitions, and causes of policy change in the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF); Rob Robinson uses CT to specify further both sources of resistance to policy change and sources of dramatic policy change in Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET); and Christopher Weare, Paul Lichterman, and Nicole Esparza use the theory to specify sources of collaboration in policy networks as well as sources of network dissolution. Other contributors argue and/or demonstrate that CT can help specify the culturally pluralized conditions for successful policy deliberation, the cultural sources of policy narratives, and how cultural biases are likely to interact with policy frames. This Special Issue invites policy scholars to consider how the theory might help advance their research interests and the field.

Many political scientists first learned of anthropologist Mary Douglas's cultural theory (CT) through Aaron Wildavsky's APSA presidential address (Wildavsky 1987), in which he sought to explain the value of this theoretical approach for political science. Since then, much additional work has been done to develop CT as an ambitious general theory of politics.

In States of Knowledge (2004), Sheila Jasanoff argues that we gain explanatory power by thinking of natural and social orders as being produced together, but she and her volume contributors do not yet offer a theory of the coproduction of scientific knowledge and social order. This article uses Mary Douglas's cultural theory to identify four recurring states of knowledge and to specify political–cultural conditions for the coproduction of scientific knowledge, social order, and scientific, cultural, and policy change. The plausibility of this theory is illustrated by using it to explain the coproduction and transformation of forest and wildlife science and management in the Pacific Northwest.

A major complaint against cultural theories is that they cannot explain political change (Lockhart 1997). Cultural and institutional accounts of politics are also often seen as antagonistic (Chai 1997; Grendstad and Selle 1995; Lockhart 1999). The cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others (see, e.g., Schwarz and Thompson 1990; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990), by contrast, offers a theory of culture that includes a theory of cultural change that integrates institutions into its explanation of change (Lockhart 1997, 1999; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990, 69–81; Wildavsky 1985). Moreover, CT can help specify the cultural conditions for sudden, big institutional and policy change, thereby, I argue, strengthening Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones's "punctuated equilibria" (PE) theory of change (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002). The plausibility of this CT of PE change is illustrated in this article by using it to explain dramatic changes in forest and wildlife management in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) (building on Swedlow 2002a, b, 2003, 2007, 2009, and 2011a, b).