ArticleHealth policy and planning2016
Why do policies change? Institutions, interests, ideas and networks in three cases of policy reform.
Article in Health policy and planning, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 144 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Lessons learned from descriptions and evaluations of knowledge translation platforms supporting evidence-informed policy-making in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review.Health research policy and systems · 2020Pooled it
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- A political economy analysis of the legislative response to unhealthy food and beverage marketing in Chile, Canada and the UK.Globalization and health · 2025Article
- Form and functioning: contextualising the start of the global financing facility policy processes in Burkina Faso.Global health action · 2024Article
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- Comparing priority received by global health issues: a measurement framework applied to tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and dengue fever.BMJ global health · 2024Article
- The role of private healthcare sector actors in health service delivery and financing policy processes in low-and middle-income countries: a scoping review.BMJ global health · 2024Article
- Evidence uptake is only part of the process: Stakeholders' insights on WHO treatment guideline recommendation processes for radical cure of P. vivax malaria.PLOS global public health · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Policy researchers have used various categories of variables to explain why policies change, including those related to institutions, interests and ideas. Recent research has paid growing attention to the role of policy networks-the actors involved in policy-making, their relationships with each other, and the structure formed by those relationships-in policy reform across settings and issues; however, this literature has largely ignored the theoretical integration of networks with other policy theories, including the '3Is' of institutions, interests and ideas. This article proposes a conceptual framework integrating these variables and tests it on three cases of policy change in Burkina Faso, addressing the need for theoretical integration with networks as well as the broader aim of theory-driven health policy analysis research in low- and middle-income countries. We use historical process tracing, a type of comparative case study, to interpret and compare documents and in-depth interview data within and between cases. We found that while network changes were indeed associated with policy reform, this relationship was mediated by one or more of institutions, interests and ideas. In a context of high donor dependency, new donor rules affected the composition and structure of actors in the networks, which enabled the entry and dissemination of new ideas and shifts in the overall balance of interest power ultimately leading to policy change. The case of strategic networking occurred in only one case, by civil society actors, suggesting that network change is rarely the spark that initiates the process towards policy change. This analysis highlights the important role of changes in institutions and ideas to drive policymaking, but hints that network change is a necessary intermediate step in these processes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.