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.
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. The current Australian health insurance system has its origins in a tumultuous and foundational sequence of policy change between 1972 and 1984, which settled down in the subsequent 15 years or so to leave Australia with a distinctive but important
failures play out in longer sequences of policy-making. The next section explores notions of policy learning in terms of the different types of failure identified. This leads into the main focus of the article: exploring connections between repeated assessments of policy failure, the catalysts of deinstitutionalisation and subsequent opportunities for system-wide policy learning and reform. article SPECIAL ISSUE • Policy learning and policy failure Adrian Kay 88 Selected evidence from the reform trajectory of Australian health insurance policy from the mid-1970s
