Constructing Policy Paradigms Through Implementation: Medical Cannabis Reforms in Colombia and Argentina

Abstract

This article explores how medicinal cannabis policy reforms in Colombia and Argentina evolved not through radical legislative overhaul but through incremental and contested adjustments during implementation. Drawing on the policy paradigms framework, we offer a Latin American application of recent conceptualizations that view paradigms not as fully formed at the time of adoption but as gradually constructed through actor responses to implementation anomalies—mismatches between policy expectations and real-world effects. Using comparative process tracing, we show how mid-level bureaucrats, civil society actors, and cannabis entrepreneurs reinterpreted these anomalies to revise instruments, redefine goals, and reshape ideas of legitimate medical cannabis use. In Colombia, a pharmaceutical, export-oriented paradigm was adjusted in response to market and bureaucratic bottlenecks by authorizing flower exports and tolerating informal access arrangements. In Argentina, civil society pressure led to reforms recognizing home and associative cultivation, culminating in an inclusive industrial legislation. These cases illustrate that implementation is not a neutral delivery phase but a key arena for paradigm construction and political contestation. The article contributes to scholarship on policy change, moral regulation, and cannabis governance by showing how post-decision reforms can recalibrate the content and direction of emerging policy paradigms.