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This paper applied the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to environmental governance studies and examined the validity of policy change hypotheses in Japan, where few ACF studies exist despite the seemingly appropriate conditions to apply the ACF. While environmental governance has been studied for several decades, there is no prevailing research framework. I used the ACF to explain the policy process leading to Japan's first large dam removal, a critical case of major policy change in environmental governance. Using data from interviews and newspaper articles, I identified advocacy coalitions, the events leading to the policy change, and the changes in coalition resources through discourse network analysis and other methods used in the ACF literature. Consequently, I found that the policy change hypotheses were valid and that coalition resources were significant intervening variables that lead to policy change. However, I also found the need for further refinements of the policy change hypotheses in the ACF. This paper confirms the utility of the ACF's policy change hypotheses and research methods to understand the complex dynamics of environmental governance.

We examine the assumption of individuals as ‘homo narrans' and the effect of their demographics and beliefs in shaping policy narratives, using climate change as a case. To do so we use a version of the Narrative Policy Framework codebook to analyze open-ended survey responses in a highly liberal and knowledgeable convenience sample. We use two different ways of collecting narratives in surveys. The first method relies on priming participants to consider certain narrative elements, while the other primes participants to consider the overarching narrative instead of individual elements. In line with public opinion research, we find that conservative ideology and media choices are associated with the use of fewer victims and policy problems. Finally, we find that wording a question in a way that primes overall narratives and problems produces a more reliable result in terms of complete policy narratives than do questions geared toward other narrative elements. We conclude that open-ended survey questions provide a valuable and underutilized, but limited, source of data for scholars interested in the NPF.

The article investigates whether reflexive regulation, which emphasizes the regulatee's ability to self-regulate – and in particular to adapt their organizational structure and behavior to the regulators' prescriptive goals – leads to companies behaving in the way prescribed by the regulator. Five conditions, which can explain why companies comply or do not comply with reflexive regulation, are specified and then tested empirically. The findings show that almost half of the companies did not comply, or complied only partly, with the reflexive regulation, and that for companies to comply with reflexive regulation certain conditions are salient, including worker involvement, professionalization, and management support. The overall results highlight the limitations of a self-regulatory approach and stress the heterogeneity of companies.