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The article discusses advocacy coalition formation and the roles of key actors in science, technology and innovation (ST&I) policies for social inclusion in a subnational context. The policy subsystem category and concept of advocacy coalition are used in the context of the advocacy coalition framework and address the need to understand the influences of key actors (policy broker and policy entrepreneur) on it. The policy subsystem was outlined using case-oriented research and the discourse was analyzed in order to understand the policy actors' beliefs. The analysis of two cases of ST&I policy processes for social inclusion (assistive technology and social technology) highlighted policy broker and policy entrepreneur key roles in the emergence of policy subsystems, but had different effects on advocacy coalition formation. The policy entrepreneur had a closer relationship with advocacy coalition building when setting up regular mechanisms to share beliefs and policy-oriented learning, as well as taking initiatives to coordinate the collective action of members in the early advocacy coalition. Although relevant in agenda setting and maintaining a specific social inclusion agenda in the policy process, the policy broker did not achieve a positive relationship with advocacy coalition building. The article corroborates the possibility of incorporating the concept of policy entrepreneur in analyses of the advocacy coalition framework and highlights this actor's characteristics through this analytical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the use of social technologies for the instrumentation of public action and the adoption of actor-network theory as support for relational analysis. In order that, a qualitative case study was carried out to analyze the adoption of pedagogy of alternation as an instrument for rural education policy in the state of Rondônia, Brazil. It was found that, although the state government wanted to define a standard model, the instrumentation of rural education was translated differently in different regions of the state, through public action that involved a broad actor-network. Concluding that, as a result of these multiple and different forms of sociotechnical instrumentation of public action, there is a greater demand for the opening of government actors to the relational dynamics of the process of construction of public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]