Global governance of emerging technologies and the advocacy coalition framework: An introduction to the symposium

Abstract

Emerging technologies interact with social, economic, and regulatory structures, producing complex and far-reaching effects. Governing these technologies requires transnational coordination, as national policies often generate cross-border consequences. Epistemic communities play a central role in shaping shared problem definitions, causal beliefs, and policy interpretations. While international relations scholarship has explored the geopolitical, economic, and institutional dimensions of emerging technology governance, less attention has been paid to how actors’ beliefs drive policy outcomes. This Symposium addresses this gap by applying the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), which links micro-level learning and belief formation to macro-level policy change. By foregrounding coalition-based dynamics, the ACF provides a structured lens to analyse how epistemic communities mobilise around technological governance issues and influence global norms. This Symposium focuses on four emerging technological domains: cyber warfare (Shires and Smeets), human germline genome editing technology (Lo), military application of artificial intelligence (Onderco and Javadi), and 5G (To).

Whether artificial intelligence (AI), 5G networks, or human germline genome editing, emerging technologies interact with social, economic, and regulatory structures, influencing reality in complex ways. According to Rotolo et al. (2015: 1828), emerging technologies are systems that, as they gain prominence, have the potential to exert a considerable impact on socioeconomic domains, observed in terms of the composition of actors, patterns of interaction, and knowledge production.

Given their transformative potential, the advancement of emerging technologies has generated a pressing demand for rules and regulations to govern their development and usage. Global technology governance involves the decision-making process to regulate the development and dissemination of technology (World Economic Forum, 2019). This encompasses implementing laws, establishing supervisory bodies, and enforcing policies aimed at ensuring safe and ethical technology deployment.

In emerging technology governance, states are unable to act in isolation, as domestic policy choices routinely produce cross-border effects. For example, national decisions to deploy AI-based military applications can have transnational security effects by lowering the threshold for the use of force and incentivising reciprocal deployment by other states, thereby generating security externalities that no single state can manage alone. These challenges are further compounded by the fact that this governance has become a central arena of geopolitical competition, where major powers seek to shape standards and norms in line with their strategic interests (Schmidt, 2022).

Under these conditions, the governance of emerging technologies increasingly depends on transnational forms of coordination among relevant stakeholders. This organisational need favours the creation of epistemic policy communities or coalitions whose interests and agendas transcend sovereign borders. Epistemic communities, defined as ‘networks of professionals with recognized expertise in a domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge’ (Haas, 1992: 3), often play a central role in governance by shaping shared problem definitions, causal beliefs, and the interpretation of scientific and technical information. Understanding the dynamics of these epistemic communities is crucial in the realm of emerging technology policies, where discussions and decision-making are primarily guided by groups of scientists and ethicists. This Symposium aims to explore how these communities operate and their implications for transnational emerging technology governance. As discussed below, these dynamics are central to coalition-based approaches to policy analysis as proposed by the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF).

International relations (IR) scholars have extensively delved into the governance of emerging technologies. A prominent theme in IR scholarship on emerging technologies concerns great-power rivalries and the implications of technology leadership for global authority and multilateral rulemaking (Khan et al., 2022; Miailhe, 2018; Schmidt, 2022; Suleyman, 2023). A strand of IR work has emerged around the governance of the Internet, exploring how authority is distributed among states, private companies, civil society, and technical communities (DeNardis, 2014). Similarly, a growing subfield addresses AI governance, encompassing themes such as norm entrepreneurship around explainability, fairness, or human-centric AI to shape emerging global guidelines (Sweijs and Romansky, 2024). Elsewhere, IR scholars have explored the long-term strategic implications of emerging technologies on military (Gilli and Gilli, 2016) and economic power (Zhang, 2024).

While scholars have extensively examined the geopolitical, economic, and institutional dimensions of emerging technology governance, our understanding of how policy actors mobilise around specific beliefs and how those beliefs guide policy outcomes remains limited. Consequently, there is a need for a framework that links micro-level learning to macro-level transformation. ACF provides a structured way to analyse these dimensions, which are often overlooked in traditional power-centric or institutionalist analyses. By integrating the ACF into IR scholarship on emerging technology governance, this Symposium enhances our understanding of the micro-level interactions that shape the macro-level governance of emerging technologies.

This Symposium focuses on four emerging technological domains: cyber warfare (Shires and Smeets), human germline genome editing technology (Lo), military application of artificial intelligence (Onderco and Javadi), and 5G (To). The selection of these cases reflects these domains’ substantial transformative impact on societies and economies. They encompass issues stemming from national security to ethical debates on heritable changes to the human genome, which taken together, carry broader transnational strategic implications than more narrowly scoped technologies (e.g. subsea cable infrastructure). The methodological techniques employed – from interviews to document analysis – and the range of technology examined sustain the overarching theoretical argument that the ACF provides a valuable lens for studying the complex and evolving policy environment of emerging technologies.

Advocacy coalition framework

The ACF focuses on policy subsystems, defined as ‘sets of actors who are involved in dealing with a policy problem’ (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993: 24). ACF assumes that actors within a policy subsystem will form alliances, known as advocacy coalitions, based on shared values and beliefs. The ACF delineates a three-tiered belief system hierarchy, comprising the most stable deep core beliefs, policy core beliefs, and the least stable secondary beliefs/aspects. Deep core beliefs are normative beliefs or ‘underlying personal philosophy’, for example, beliefs on whether people are evil or socially redeemable. Policy core beliefs encompass basic strategies and policy propositions, or ‘fundamental policy positions’ for achieving deep core beliefs in a policy subsystem. Secondary beliefs are specific policy instruments associated with proposed solutions, and these beliefs are the most susceptible to change. These beliefs include means of delivery and implementation of policy goals (Cairney, 2019).

When policy core beliefs diverge, policy subsystems tend to develop two or more stable coalitions over time. These coalitions compete to achieve policy outcomes aligned with their respective beliefs (Cairney, 2019). The ACF framework allows the analysis of the different ways by which competing coalitions form, how they manage and deploy their resources, their internal narratives, and policy narratives (Weible et al., 2011: 351–354). The ACF suggests that within-coalition learning is more likely than cross-coalition learning, intermediate levels of conflict are conducive to learning, and brokers can facilitate learning between coalitions (Li and Weible, 2021). Although coalitions engage in policy-oriented learning, they are more likely to compromise on the secondary aspects (i.e. means) rather than the policy core aspects (i.e. goals) of public policies (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993).

Sources of instability mostly arise from ‘shocks’, which are the combination of events and the response by coalitions to events (Cairney, 2019). An external shock relates to events external to the subsystem, such as a sudden shift in public opinion that impacts the positions of competing coalitions, for example, a surge of ethical concern regarding human germline genome editing. An internal shock relates to the failure of current policy to resolve the policy problem, such as the inability of international regulations to prevent He Jiankui from creating gene-edited babies. A dominant coalition might exploit these events or shocks to strengthen its position and constrain its opponents. Alternatively, a less powerful coalition might leverage these shocks to challenge the dominant coalition (Gabehart et al., 2022).

The rapid evolution of emerging technologies and their governance demands a framework that accounts for the dynamics of belief-driven coalitions, policy learning, and adaptation. As shown, the ACF meets this need by highlighting how coalitions mobilise resources, adapt strategies, and shape policy outcomes. Building on epistemic communities’ scholarship on the role of expert knowledge and learning under conditions of uncertainty, the ACF provides a systematic account of how such knowledge is embedded within coalitions and how it is relevant over time.

Having illustrated the advantages of integrating the ACF with existing IR studies on emerging technology governance, the next section will specifically delve into the framework’s applicability to this policy subsystem.

Applicability of ACF to emerging technology policies at the global level

The ACF is well-suited for analysing emerging technology governance. First, technological advancements involve multiple stakeholders, resulting in the expansion of existing coalitions or the formation of new ones. This aligns with the ACF’s focus on coalition formation and interaction. Second, technology policies often involve scientific and technical information, which can be easily politicised. The ACF’s emphasis on the role of beliefs and knowledge in coalition-building helps in understanding how scientific information and knowledge of epistemic communities have been utilised or exploited to shape technology policies. Third, science and technology have become highly contested arenas among major powers like the United States, the European Union, and China. Coalitions in these jurisdictions increasingly view themselves as operating within broader regional or global contexts, and the ACF’s extended conceptualisation of coalitions along the ‘domestic-foreign frontier’ (Litfin, 2000: 236) sheds light on how these actors navigate and influence multilevel governance structures beyond the nation-state.

While the ACF was originally designed to explain policy change at national and subnational levels (Haar and Pierce, 2021), its emphasis on belief-driven coalitions and policy learning remains highly relevant for international policymaking processes, where parallel coalitions form across multiple governance layers. Nonetheless, international subsystems differ from their national counterparts in that decision-making authority is more diffuse due to shared authority among various actors, hierarchies among international regimes and institutions are more difficult to establish, and enforcement tends to be decentralised and voluntary. The ACF has been employed before to examine transnational issues like climate change policy (Litfin, 2000) and global tobacco policy (Farquharson, 2003), yet no studies have explored the relevance of the ACF in comprehending emerging technology policy beyond the national level. This is where our Symposium makes a key contribution.

Emerging technologies as nascent policy subsystems

Yet, the emerging nature of these technologies challenges numerous assumptions underlying the ACF. The emerging technologies discussed in this Symposium have often existed for less than ten years, with some not fully developed yet. Existing research primarily focuses on policy subsystems associated with issues that have consistently received policymakers’ attention for a decade or more. These subsystems are considered ‘mature’ and typically consist of integrated actors anchored by specialised organisations, government subunits, and existing policies (Nohrstedt and Weible, 2010: 9). Hence, emerging technologies should be viewed as what ACF scholarship labels as ‘nascent’ policy subsystems. Nascent issue areas have recently emerged on the public agenda, have a limited history of policy outputs, received less consideration in public decision-making forums, and where advocates have only recently become active (Stritch, 2015: 438). Viewing emerging technologies as nascent policy subsystems enables the ACF to capture how coalitions form, align, and learn in weakly institutionalised policy environments, and how early belief configurations, often forged under conditions of uncertainty or urgency, shape agenda-setting and governance trajectories over time.

Conclusion

The articles in this Symposium illuminate how emergent transnational policy subsystems form and evolve. Because they are relatively new, these policy subsystems are still forming, providing a unique lens into how agendas are set, how coalitions come together, and how power relationships across borders drive policy decisions under diverse timelines and degrees of urgency.

Shires and Smeets (2026) illustrate how global cyber warfare governance, developing over a longer time horizon, has been structured by two enduring advocacy coalitions with contrasting beliefs about militarisation, information control, and international law, and how successive internal and external shocks have progressively reshaped coalition strategies and negotiating venues. Lo (2026)’s analysis of human germline genome editing highlights how an abrupt internal shock, the He Jiankui case, catalysed rapid agenda-setting in a previously fragmented and weakly institutionalised policy subsystem. This enabled a precautionary coalition to consolidate its dominance and translate ethical beliefs into coordinated global governance efforts. Onderco and Javadi (2026) examine military AI governance as a nascent yet rapidly consolidating subsystem, where competing coalitions pursue divergent regulatory visions across parallel venues, revealing how policy-oriented learning from institutional deadlock informs coalition strategy and forum selection at an early stage of subsystem formation. Finally, To’s (2026) study of 5G governance shows how highly polarised belief systems structure adversarial coalitions in a fast-moving and geopolitically charged subsystem, where asymmetries of power and dependence across borders shape coalition cohesion and policy outcomes under conditions of heightened urgency.

Overall, these cases indicate that emerging technology governance is shaped not just by state power or institutional design, but also by the evolving alignment and contestation of beliefs over time. These dynamics are made visible by the ACF within transnational policy subsystems that are still in formation.