The obstacle race to institutional change : the slow path to policy change of a coalition advocating for sexuality education in Norway

Abstract

Developing school sexuality education policies is a complex matter due to the controversial and politicized nature of sexuality. This thesis aims at understanding the development of institutional change in the presence of complex policy systems that involve multiple actors in the policy process. To achieve this aim, it analyses the actions of an advocacy coalition that works to change sexuality education policies in Norway. The study adopts the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) for understanding the interconnections among the macro-level of the political and historical context, the micro-level of the actor's motivations and the meso-level of coalition's goals and strategies. Moreover, it supports the ACF with the Historical Institutionalism (HI) approach to explain the struggle between the actors' efforts to achieve policy change and the persistence of cultural and political institutions. Through the conduction of interviews and the analysis of relevant policy documents, this study identified a close interaction and co-dependence among different elements of the political system. In implementing its strategy, the coalition encountered facilitating and hindering factors that determined the achievement of a slow incremental change. The advocacy coalition started and continuously influenced the change process through a strategy of knowledge production and sharing that contributed in changing attitudes and perception of policy participants on sexuality education. The active agency of the coalition's actors in creating arenas and channels of sharing and coordination facilitated the learning process. Nonetheless, fixed institutions and conflicts of interests hindered the achievement of a major policy change. Therefore, this thesis identifies the policy process as a complex interaction among different factors and elements that generate reciprocal influence and jointly determine the process' outcomes. Hence, the study concluded that the institutional setting is essential in determining rules and constraints for the actors. However, the active agency of policy participants can strategically exploit the historical and institutional setting for achieving the actors' goals.