Testing the ACF hypothesis.

Case studies in wildlife management and its policy often lack a unified analytical framework, there are few studies that have systematically investigated policy processes and pathways of policy change. This paper examines Japan’s ungulate (deer, wild boar) management policy as a case study, applying the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to the study of wildlife management to elucidate the mechanisms driving policy changes in ungulate management while evaluating the framework’s effectiveness. Insights into policy subsystems, policy beliefs, policy-oriented learning, and both external and internal perturbations in the advocacy coalition framework may be useful in understanding the policy change in wildlife management. Data were collected through diet records, official documents, newspaper articles, and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders. Using this data, discourse network analysis was employed to identify coalition structures, resources and policy-oriented learning of two advocacy coalitions—the Hunting Coalition and the Protection Coalition—and events leading to policy change were identified. The analysis revealed that between the 1990s, when ungulate damage became severe, and 2014, the core attributes of Japan’s government program transitioned from a centralized protection-focused policy to a decentralized policy promoting hunting. This shift was driven by four pathways proposed in the ACF’s bottom-up policy change hypothesis: policy-oriented learning, internal perturbations, external perturbations, and negotiated agreements. These findings highlight the utility of the ACF as an analytical framework. This study suggests that the ACF is a valuable tool for understanding the complex dynamics of wildlife management.