Social Learning

Social learning is an approach to policy analysis that originated in the work of Albert Bandura. His examination of how behavior is acquired and regulated through a cognitively oriented theory was explained in terms of the processing of both direct and symbolic sources of information. In the context of governance, social learning generically refers to a process through which policymakers adjust their ideas and practices to changes in their environment and how these changes become manifestations in the revisions of policy that ensue as a result. It is perhaps most associated with the work of Hugh Heclo and Peter Hall.

Heclo's work in the 1970s focused on the processes through which learning took place among social policymakers in Great Britain and Sweden, concerned especially with the processes of puzzling used to resolve policy problems, with policy making being a form of collective puzzlement on society's behalf. Heclo suggested that learning takes place in two particular forms, termed classic conditioning, which is effectively routine, conditioned policy responses, and instrumental conditioning, which is where policy learning takes place in situations of major policy change. In periods of relative stability, both in terms of the continuity of those making policy as well as the policy environment, Heclo suggested that classical conditioning is likely to be prevalent, a mode of policy making where policymakers effectively muddle through, making small adaptations to policies as necessary, but without much need for thought. For instrumental conditioning, however, something more radical must take place in which policymakers come to question their underlying ideas. For this to happen, Heclo suggested, it is likely that we will need a change in government, even though the learning takes place from elites, whose views become attached to a popularly organized group. Heclo was fairly clear about the processes involved in classic conditioning in his work, but instrumental conditioning appeared to be somewhat less developed.

Heclo's work was hugely influential, but not placed in a coherent theoretical framework until the 1990s, when Peter Hall's examination of UK macroeconomic policy change led him to construct a model of social learning that he suggests state policymakers engage in. Hall defined social learning in the policy context as a deliberate attempt to adjust the goals or techniques of policy in response to past experience or new information. Learning is indicated, Hall suggested, when policy changes as a result of these deliberate attempts at change. Hall suggested there are three central features in the prevailing model of social learning utilized by contemporary theorists of the state.

The first central feature suggested by Hall is that policymakers' goals are influenced by policy legacies, and that the influence of the past is more significant than prevailing economic and social conditions. The major locations of these policy legacies are in the people and practices of the civil service bureaucracy and the state. This clearly follows Heclo's suggestion that the major sources of learning are not politicians, but civil servants and other elites. This feature is [Page 885]significant because it suggests that policy is subject to considerable inertia—it is theoretically possible for policy to change quickly, but is unlikely to do so because of the difficulty of changing practices inside a government bureaucracy. Second, Hall suggests that those promoting policies are likely to be experts in the relevant field, including elected officials and civil servants. Again, this follows Heclo, that is, a technocratic model of policy with a large role to play for experts. Finally, Hall's third feature is that the social learning model is concerned with the capacity of states to operate without pluralistic considerations—to be able to operate with autonomy from societal pressures in the formulation of policy goals. This last feature allows the state to be insulated, to some extent, from societal change and so, again, creating a tendency toward inertia.

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