Agricultural pesticide use is a wicked sustainability challenge: Trade-offs exist between health, environmental, agro-economic, and socio-political objectives. Various actors involved have diverse beliefs regarding these trade-offs and policies to address the challenge. But to what extent does the agreement or disagreement between actors reflect belief similarities or differences, and thus, the formation of advocacy coalitions? To answer this question, the study draws on the advocacy coalition framework and investigates data from 54 key actors in the case of Swiss pesticide policy. The study explores the relationship between the actors' (dis)agreement relations and their beliefs using Random Forests. Coalitions are identified through block modeling and beliefs based on multi-attribute value theory. The study shows that the two relations are a good proxy for identifying coalitions with conflict lines concerning beliefs and presents an approach to exploring ideological reasons behind (dis)agreement relations that supports identifying conflicting beliefs relevant to future policy solutions.

Calls for supporting sustainability through more and better research rest on an incomplete understanding of scientific evidence use. We argue that a variety of barriers to a transformative impact of evidence arises from diverse actor motivations within different stages of evidence use. We abductively specify this variety in policy and practice arenas for three actor motivations (truth-seeking, sense-making, and utility-maximizing) and five stages (evidence production, uptake, influence on decisions, effects on sustainability outcomes, and feedback from outcome evaluations). Our interdisciplinary synthesis focuses on the sustainability challenge of reducing environmental and human health risks of agricultural pesticides. It identifies barriers resulting from (1) truth-seekers’ desire to reduce uncertainty that is complicated by evidence gaps, (2) sense-makers’ evidence needs that differ from the type of evidence available, and (3) utility-maximizers’ interests that guide strategic evidence use. We outline context-specific research–policy–practice measures to increase evidence use for sustainable transformation in pesticides and beyond.