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Policy Learning

Policy learning consists of a process of acquiring knowledge, skills, habits, or tendencies through the experience of policy making. The concept of learning was transferred from the field of cognitive psychology to policy analysis during the 1970s. In a context of bounded rationality, this notion implicates an implicit capacity of learning by policymakers and goes beyond the mechanistic-behavioral vision of public policy that limited the action of participants to the couple stimuli/reaction. Thus, policy making is more an incremental process than a series of radical shifts.

Policy Learning in Context

One of the first authors to use the notion of policy learning was Hugh Heclo (in 1974). In his book on social policies in Great Britain and Sweden, he demonstrated that politics also integrates an intellectual dimension and cannot be reduced to conflicts of power. Actors try to reduce the context of uncertainty through a learning process and the integration of policy advocacy. The latter allows reusing and modifying past routines and experiences with respect to a new situation.

The concept of policy learning varies in intensity through space and time. On the one hand, the policy learning process involves four dimensions. The first one consists of the introduction of new information, the second is a new interpretation of past policies, the third can be the involvement of new ideas, and the last one is based on a change of policy context. On the other hand, learning also leads one to take into account the time dimension. Learning can involve short-term or long-term modifications. These changes depend on the capability of adaptation of policymakers to a new context. As said before, this continuous adaptation makes policy making an incremental process ruled by marginal adjustments with respect to external pressures.

Related Concepts

The concept of policy learning differs from the notions of political inheritance. The former defines the capacities of transformation of actors. It is an essentially active concept that stresses the free will (even if limited) of participants and the possibility to adopt an alternative route among different available options. In turn, political inheritance (or policy legacy) refers to pressures exerted by context on policymakers. In this second case, participants act in a passive way. They are totally constrained and have no margins of action. They have only one course to choose; no alternatives are available.

In the same way, policy learning and policy transfer—or lesson drawing—share a common background. Both concepts refer to the selection and the adaptation of the best solutions to public issues in a context of informational asymmetry. Nevertheless, policy transfer (from another government or to another government) is just a modality of policy learning that relates to a larger process.

The Ambiguity of Policy Learning

The notion of policy learning is a theoretical tool of analysis that is strongly linked to a cognitivist vision of public policies. It is based on two related interrogations: the question of actors involved in the learning process and the question of levels of learning. First, the identity of policy learners is not always clearly defined. Elected people, civil servants, and state experts are at the core of the learning process. By accumulating experience under the pressure of political events (at the domestic and international levels), these actors progressively change the structure of state policies. However, this elitist vision contrasts with the pluralist approach, which includes new participants such as trade unions, associations, lobbies, companies, and media. Since the 1980s, the thinking about policy learning also includes research on policy networks and has demonstrated the interaction between public and private sectors at different tiers of governance. From this point of view, learning is a changing process involving common thinking on the past and future, and where the state is just another (even if fundamental) part of the whole.

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