Political authority and policy change: Water and sanitation policy in Ecuador from the policy networks approach

In the field of public policies studies, there has lately emerged a growing interest in analyzing why and how public policy change. The aim of this article is to study the change of water and sanitation public policy in Ecuador between 2008 and 2015, in order to explain the main causes of its transformation and its consequences. To this aim, the ideational model (Kisby, 2007) of policy networks is used at three levels: context, network and policy results. The hypothesis held here is that policy instruments change due to the external intervention of the President of the Republic which, in turn, reorganizes the policy context, network structure and resources of the decision-making process. Policy change based on the direct intervention of a political authority can thus cancel the consensus within the policy networks, transform the decision-making process, change the policy instruments and replace the actors' programmatic beliefs (Marsh and Smith, 2000).