First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this updated volume explores policy failures and the valuable opportunities for learning that they offer.
Policy successes and failures offer important lessons for public officials, but often they do not learn from these experiences. The studies in this volume investigate this broken link. The book defines policy learning and failure and organises the main studies in these fields along the key dimensions of processes, products and analytical levels. Drawing together a range of experts in the field, the volume sketches a research agenda linking policy scholars with policy practice.
First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this critical and practical volume challenges policy theory scholars to change the way they produce and communicate research.
Leading academics propose eight ways to synthesise and translate state of the art knowledge to equip scholars to communicate their insights with each other and a wider audience. Chapters consider topics such as narratives as tools for influencing policy change, essential habits of successful policy entrepreneurs, and applying cultural theory to navigate the policy process.
Providing theoretical clarity and accumulated knowledge, this text highlights the vital importance of translating policy research in practical and understandable ways.
The articles on which Chapters 2, 3 and 5 are based are available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula.
It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices.
Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.
This chapter studies the connections between repeated assessments of policy failure, the catalysts of deinstitutionalisation, and subsequent opportunities for system-wide policy learning and reform. Selected evidence from the reform trajectory of Australian health insurance policy from the mid-1970s to late-1990s is used to explore these possible relationships. Here, failure delegitimised health policy institutions, making them increasingly vulnerable and giving them weak learning capacity to reform in anything but a suboptimal way. The result is a cycle of failure and dysfunctional learning. The Australian health insurance case allows one to catalogue at least one pattern of the relationships between policy failure, deinstitutionalisation, and learning. Three core analytical arguments underpin this pattern. First, policy failures create opportunities for learning at a system-wide level, only after institutions have been eroded and exhausted by repeated failure. Second, this first claim holds in both the expert and political inquiry dimensions of policy failure. Third, learning processes are related to the particular sequence of deinstitutionalisation processes; in particular, initial deinstitutionalisation in the expert domain creates the conditions for political learning processes.
procedures? Or, instead, is this a policy process with the main goal of fostering participation? The ‘tone’ of the policy process shapes the style and nature of learning. Our first lesson is therefore that learning has different qualities and logics depending on this tone. We will refer to four process-related contexts: epistemic (or knowledge- driven), reflexivity, bargaining and compliance with hierarchy. The second lesson is that learning has its own triggers and hindrances. It does not simply happen. The third lesson concerns dysfunctional learning – learning that
learning processes on failure. Here, we tap into recent work exploring the idea of dysfunctional learning (Dunlop, 2014, 216, table 2; Dunlop and Radaelli, 2016). The proposition is that learning may not always be a good thing. In their account of policy failures in the Eurozone, Dunlop and Radaelli outline this disruptive potential and the fragility of learning between Member States and EU institutions (see 2016, 111, 117–219). How can the failure of groups or collective processes mediate policy learning? We have established that there is a dearth of knowledge
learning has its own triggers and hindrances. It does not simply happen. The third lesson concerns dysfunctional learning – learning that is ‘bad’. The question ‘bad for whom, or for what?’ allows multiple answers. Learning can be ‘bad’ for the organisation in question, or because it violates some normative standards like pluralism, accountability, or legitimacy. Finally, we conclude with what this type of research agenda can deliver to social scientists and practitioners. Lesson 1: Learning has different qualities Let us start again from our definition of
can first consider the impact of learning processes on failure. Here, we tap into recent work exploring the idea of dysfunctional learning (Dunlop, 2014 , Table 2, 216; Dunlop and Radaelli, 2016 ; 2018 ). The proposition is that learning may not always be a good thing. In their account of policy failures in the Eurozone, Dunlop and Radaelli outline this disruptive potential and the fragility of learning between Member States and EU institutions (see 2016: 111, 117–219). How can the failure of groups or collective processes mediate policy learning? We have
criticised narrow views on what constituted ‘school safety’, notably views primarily concerned with security measures such as discipline and building security. Alternatively, the panel proposed that school safety issues should be reconsidered in light of what it identified as ‘dysfunctional’ learning environments. Specifically, ‘school safety’ should be synonymous with what the panel termed ‘school health’ and ‘healthy learning environments’ (SCSAP, 2008: 1–2). The report proposed that the TDSB adopt strategies that would re-engage marginalised and ‘complex
