Policy learning Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This article analyzes the Italian government's response to the sovereign debt crisis. Given the severity of the fiscal crisis affecting Italy, this article provides insights about the crisis's implication for public administration in such a politically sensitive environment where drastic and far-reaching measures had to be taken by the government. Drawing on the historical institutionalist approach, the impact of the crisis is not considered in isolation but in the context of the historical trajectory that has shaped the government's capacity to respond. To assess the crisis's implications for public administration, the empirical analysis focuses on public employment as an area that is especially exposed to fiscal restraint. The findings reveal that the current crisis has been managed with straight cutback management, as public administration has been considered by policy makers just as a source of public expenditure to be squeezed rather than as a provider of public services in need of modernization so as to sustain economic growth. The global crisis that started in 2007-2008 had significant implications for the fiscal position of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations (Posner & Blondal, 2012). As the global crisis mutated from a problem affecting the private economy to a sovereign debt problem, public spending cutbacks came

- by and +1
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- Italian Politics, Historical Institutionalism, Policy learning, New Institutionalism

Nuclear power accidents repeatedly reveal that the industry has an incomplete understanding of the complex risks involved in its operation. Through analyzing the investigation of a nuclear power incident in Sweden in 2006, I show how the industry’s learning
practices shape recurrent normalization of risk regulation after such surprises. Learning is shaped through institutionalized measures of sufficiency and particular “risk objects” (e.g.
human factors and safety culture) created through learning from previous events. Subsequent regulatory measures are shaped through improvement scripts associated with these risk objects. These learning practices exclude alternative conceptual perspectives to understand and address safety-critical incidents. Latent risks will therefore produce similar events in the future. The article contributes to the literature on organizational learning, policy making, sensemaking and normalization in complex systems. To improve learning from incidents and regulation in high-hazard industries, social scientists and a wider circle of stakeholders should be included in the regulatory and post-incident
examination processes.

This chapter reviews the recent education policy initiatives in the EU through two lenses: (1) policy learning through the open-method of coordination, as a set of mechanisms of education governance, and, (2) what these mechanisms mean for the relationships between national and transnational levels of policy making. It is argued that policy learning acts as a particular mode of control of the direction, nature and content of the desired reforms, while at the same time there are appeals to its political neutrality and operational effectiveness. In the process of implementing and monitoring policy learning, national institutions become important sites for the understanding of reforms in practice. Drawing on a critical approach to policy instrumentation and new sociological institutionalism the chapter examines key debates in the literature of Europeanisation and policy learning and how these manifest themselves in the field of education policy.
Full Reference:
Alexiadou N. (2014) "Policy learning and europeanisation in education: The governance of a field and the transfer of knowledge", In Andreas Nordin & Daniel Sundberg (Eds) Transnational policy-flows in European education Conceptualizing and governing knowledge. P.p: 123-140. Oxford Studies in Comparative Education. Oxford: Symposium books. ISBN: 978-1-873927-52-6.

May's " policy learning and failure " is tended to make the readers have a clear understanding of what policy learning is and what is policy failure. May firstly initiates his writing through clarifying the needs of policy learning in policy analysis and debate. He cites that policy learning is a desirable goal. Conceptualization of policy learning is essential to indentify the extent to and condition under which learning takes place. May identifies two forms of learning, such as-policy learning-distinguished by Instrumental policy learning and social policy learning; and political learning. May poses some questions to be considered in drawing the learning, such as-what is the basis and object of learning?; how conscious need learning be for it to be considered 'genuine'?; who learns?.

- by Ikhtiarul Arefeen
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- Policy learning, Policy Failure, Public Policy

This article analyses the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic
crisis represents a window of opportunity towards fundamental
change in the economic governance of the European Union (EU).
Adopting a historical institutionalist (HI) perspective and drawing
insights from the policy learning literature, we argue that contingent learning immediately took place and policy entrepreneurs
took important decisions recognising the new crisis as an existential
threat for the EU. Further, the pandemic crisis support fund and the
ECB pandemic emergency purchase programme represent
instances of single loop learning that leave the fundamentals of
economic governance untouched. However, and in contrast to the
Euro area crisis response, the adoption of the Recovery and
Resilience Facility (RRF) represents a bold decision and suggests
double-loop learning. It is argued that the Covid-19 crisis is a critical
juncture for the EU. As a result, EU economic governance ceases to
be limited to its regulatory function and is now complemented by
a redistributive function as well.

- by Dimitris Tsarouhas and +1
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- Historical Institutionalism, European Union, Policy learning, European Political Economy

'Rural community building' is one of the most prominent policies of rural urbanization and village renovation in China. Since the nationwide implementation of this policy within the scope of the programme 'Building a new socialist countryside', the large-scale construction of new residential complexes has accelerated the transformation of the country's rural landscape. However, extensive demolition and relocation have drawn increasing criticism, and the policy has become synonymous with the seizure of rural land resources by local governments. When Xi Jinping came to power, the new leadership initially appeared to abandon the policy but has eventually revived it. This article studies the implementation and evolution of the rural community building policy as a case of policy learning. The analysis of national and local policy documents and implementation practices in four provinces highlights a new framing of the policy, more intensive hierarchical controls over rural land use, and the state's increasing reach into village governance, as well as new incentives for local governments to continue with demolition and relocation projects. These changes reveal a mode of policy learning in the context of an authoritarian regime whose goal is to improve policy implementation in the face of growing public criticism and social tension.

Authors: Bloom, G., Paes de Sousa, R., Pillay, Y., Xiulan, Z. and Constantine, J. | IDS Policy Briefing 66 In recent years a number of countries, referred to collectively as the rising powers, have achieved rapid economic growth and... more

- by Jennifer Constantine and +1
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- Policy learning, Emerging Powers, BRICS, International Development Cooperation
- by Purwo Santoso
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- Governance, Policy learning, Centralization
- by Jesse Luttik
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- Food Systems, Food Policy, Policy learning, Food Security

Cet article évoque l’évolution des dispositifs de rénovation urbaine dans le quartier Heyvaert, où un conflit latent oppose commerce de voitures d’occasion et fonction résidentielle. L’analyse de la place du quartier Heyvaert dans les Contrats de quartier à Anderlecht fait office de miroir grossissant des objectifs à long terme des Contrats de quartier, ainsi que de marqueurs des priorités communales. L’analyse des Contrats de quartier à Anderlecht montre
également les phénomènes d’apprentissage et les recompositions des configurations d’acteurs que cette évolution des priorités politiques pour le quartier engendre.

- by Muriel Sacco
- •
- Policy learning, Urban Policy, Cureghem

Over the past decade diverse urban governance innovations and experiments have emerged with the declared aim to foster climate change mitigation and adaptation, involving actors at multiple levels and scales. This urban turn in environmental governance has been accompanied by normative claims and high expectations regarding a leading role of cities in coping with climate change. However, while time pressures for effective action are growing, little is known about the social learning processes involved in such urban climate governance innovations, and what they actually contribute to achieve the required transformations in urban systems. Therefore, this special issue presents eight selected papers that explore learning in urban climate governance practices in a variety of local, national and international contexts. Their findings point to a more ambiguous role of these practices as they tend to support incremental adjustments rather than deeper social learning for radical systemic change. Against this backdrop we propose a heuristic distinguishing basic modes and sources in governance learning that aims to facilitate future empirical research and comparison, filling a critical theory gap. Using this framework for interpretation illustrates that urban climate governance learning urgently requires more openness, parallel processes, exogenous sources, as well as novel meta-learning practices.

- by Marc Wolfram and +1
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- Urban Geography, Climate Change, Transformative Learning, Sociotechnical Systems

Around the world, there is a growing interest among policy scholars and practitioners in the role of knowledge in relation to public policy. These debates are accompanied by some confusion about what is meant by knowledge or evidence, as well as controversies around the role of scientists and suspicions of increasingly technocratic decision making. Our aim is to provide a useful overview of the major debates in this paper, and to trace six dominant discourses in current research that address the role of scientific knowledge or expertise in the policy process. We distinguish evidence-based policy making, knowledge utilisa-tion, policy learning, knowledge transfer, social construction of knowledge and boundaries, and knowing in practice as separate discourses. We show how they differ in their understanding of knowledge, of the problem to solve in terms of the role of knowledge in policy, of practical implications, as well as in their understanding of public policy and in their ontologies and epistemologies. A condensed and structured representation serves as a basis for conducting comparisons across discourses as well as to open ways for analysis of strategic associations between the discourses. We hope to contribute to extending the discussion of knowledge in policy into the realm of epistemic politics and we suggest several avenues for future research that can draw on a range of concepts from across all of the discourses.

- by Katarína Staroňová and +1
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- Policy Analysis/Policy Studies, Knowledge Management, Tacit Knowledge, Sociology of Knowledge

Following the death of Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015, China remains obsessed with Singapore, the only country in the region to achieve advanced economic industrialization without undergoing substantial political liberalization. The key “lesson” that China is trying to learn is how to combine authoritarian rule with “good governance” (“meritocratic” one-party rule). The impact of the “Singapore model” on China shows that learning by nondemocratic states is not necessarily a short-term “modular” phenomenon that is largely reactive in character, but can be long-term and highly institutionalized. It has become increasingly clear, however, that China sees what it wants to see in Singapore, making the “lessons” learned more caricature than reality. And China’s recent crackdown on dissenters, squeezing the already limited political space allowed during the post–Tiananmen Square Massacre period, is actually moving the country further away from rather than toward the Singapore model.

- by Stephan Ortmann
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- Comparative Politics, Political Science, Singapore, China

Following the success of a recent Swiss Citizens’ Initiative to grant each citizen an unconditional income guarantee and the Finnish Government’s plans to conduct the first national pilot project, the idea of a basic income as a citizens’ right has gained much prominence in the policy debate. This article reviews a number of policy developments on the ground through the lens of the policy transfer literature. In the absence of a fully developed basic income in place, proponents must rely on partially implemented schemes or proposals that differ in crucial respects from the basic income ideal. This paper outlines three sets of empirical cases and analyses what (if any) lessons we can draw from them regarding the future of basic income schemes.

- by Jurgen De Wispelaere
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- Comparative Politics, Basic Income, Policy learning, Social Security

The field of policy learning is characterised by concept stretching and lack of systematic findings. To systematize them, we combine the classic Sartorian approach to classification with the more recent insights on explanatory typologies. At the outset, we classify per genus et differentiam – distinguishing between the genus and the different species within it. By drawing on the technique of explanatory typologies to introduce a basic model of policy learning, we identify four major genera in the literature. We then generate variation within each cell by using rigorous concepts drawn from adult education research. Specifically, we conceptualize learning as control over the contents and goals of knowledge. By looking at learning through the lenses of knowledge utilization, we show that the basic model can be expanded to reveal sixteen different species. These types are all conceptually possible, but are not all empirically established in the literature. Up until now the scope conditions and connections among types have not been clarified. Our reconstruction of the field sheds light on mechanisms and relations associated with alternatives operationalizations of learning and the role of actors in the process of knowledge construction and utilization. By providing a comprehensive typology, we mitigate concept stretching problems and aim to lay the foundations for the systematic comparison across and within cases of policy learning.

- by Claire Dunlop
- •
- Typology, Governance, Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review, Policy learning

In a world characterized by complex interdependence, crises that originate in one country have the potential to rapidly diffuse across borders and have profound regional and even global impacts. The eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull in April 2010 demonstrates how rapidly a natural disaster can morph from a local crisis with local effects to a cascading crisis with international effects across multiple sectors. After spreading to Europe the ash cloud severely disrupted air travel and paralyzed the European aviation transport system. This cascading crisis caught authorities by surprise and revealed the need to improve crisis preparedness to deal with the threat of volcanic ash in particular and aviation in general at the international, EU, and national levels. In the aftermath of the event, reforms and policy changes ensued. Just over a year later, the Icelandic volcano Grímsvötn erupted, providing an opportunity to observe the revised system respond to a similar event. The origins, response, reforms, lessons learned, and questions of resilience connected to these complex negative events are the subject of this paper. The article concludes by addressing the question of whether and to what extent the vulnerabilities and problems exposed by the 2010 volcanic ash cloud event are amenable to reform.

- by Charles F Parker
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- Resilience, Crisis Management, Policy learning, Early Warning System

The concept of learning has long played a central role in the theories and frameworks used to understand policy processes. Findings described here aim to contribute to the theoretical and methodological understanding of individual learning in the policy process by explicitly examining belief change and belief reinforcement as products of policy learning, measuring both, as well as measuring the absence of either. The objective of this study is to use the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework to examine some of the factors that promote and shape policy learning, including policy actors' beliefs and the extent to which policy actors engage in various policy activities within and between belief coalitions. The results indicate that extreme beliefs are associated with belief reinforcement, relative to policy actors with more moderate beliefs, and that collaboration with individuals with differing policy views is associated with belief change.

- by Andrew Pattison
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- Climate Change, Policy learning, Public Policy

By Ann Hodgson, Ken Spours, Martyn Waring, Jim Gallagher, Tracy Irwin & David James.
This report is based on a project which began from the premise that, while national governments in the UK have actively looked to international examples when devising further education (FE) and skills policy, much less use has been made of cross-UK comparisons. This has been the case even though England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland possess a broadly common labour market, students travel across borders for employment and higher education and three of the countries (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) share qualifications. While each nation’s culture, social and political lives have diverged to some extent since democratic devolution in the late 1990s, the project took the view that the UK might still provide a useful ‘laboratory’ for policy learning in the area of FE and skills. The project was funded by The Edge Foundation, the Department for Education and City and Guilds.

- by Merten Nefs and +1
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- Serious Gaming, Policy learning, Tod, Transit-Oriented Development

The title of this research is “Policy Entrepreneurs in Innovation Diplomacy: the example of the Latvian British Chamber of Commerce in the UK” (Rīcībpolitikas uzņēmēji inovācijas diplomātijā: Latvijas-Lielbritānijas Tirdzniecības kameras piemērs). Basically it's about international innovation expertise learning, difficulties of policy knowledge transfer and role of innovation diplomats in this process. And - yes, summary is in English but otherwise it's in Latvian.

- by Didzis Meļķis
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- Management of Innovation, Knowledge Transfer, Policy learning, Economic Diplomacy

Despite a long-term focus on learning in natural resource management
(NRM), it is still debated how learning supports sustainable
real-world NRM practices. We offer a qualitative in-depth synthesis of
selected scientific empirical literature (N=53), which explores factors
affecting action-oriented learning. We inductively identify eight key
process-based and contextual factors discussed in this literature.
Three patterns emerge from our results. First, the literature discusses
both facilitated participation and self-organized collaboration as dialogical
spaces, which bridge interests and support constructive conflict
management. Second, the literature suggests practice-based
dialogs as those best able to facilitate action and puts a strong
emphasis on experimentation. Finally, not emphasized in existing
reviews and syntheses, we found multiple evidence about certain
contextual factors affecting learning, including social-ecological crises,
complexity, and power structures. Our review also points at
important knowledge gaps, which can be used to advance the current
research agenda about learning and NRM.

This paper explores the policy transfer and learning process within the UK since 1999, examining the conditions in which transfer takes place among central and devolved governments. We distinguish among concurrent policies, policy competition, coercive transfer and policy learning. Policy transfer can be more or less coercive and constrained, while policy learning is voluntary. Mechanisms for transfer include financial instruments, political parties, the civil service and policy communities. Transfer can take place from centre to periphery, from periphery to centre and across the periphery. There is also transfer at the European and international levels. As it is England that has tended to break with older policies, notably on public service provision, the pressure has been to follow its lead, with the devolved administrations resisting or conforming. The UK government has paid much less attention to possible learning from the devolved territories and sometimes has sought to insulate England from debates there, especially where politically sensitive matters or large resources are at stake. Learning among the devolved territories is only now really beginning.

- by Paul Cairney
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- Political Parties, Political Science, Policy learning, Policy Transfer

National policy on global health (NPGH) arenas are multisectoral governing arrangements for cooperation between health, development, and foreign affairs sectors in government policy for global health governance. To explore the relationship between national and global processes for governing global health, this paper asks: in what forms of interaction between NPGH arenas and global health governance are learning and networking processes present? In a multiple case study of Norwegian and Swiss NPGH arenas, we collected data on intersectoral policy processes from semi-structured interviews with 33 informants in 2014-2015. Adapting Real-Dato's framework, we analyzed each case separately , producing monographs for comparing NPGH arenas. Analyzing both NPGH arenas for relational structures linking external resources to internal policy arena processes, we found five zones of interactions-including institutions, transgovernmental clubs, and connective forms. These interactions circulate ideas and soften arenas' boundaries. We argue that NPGH is characteristic of transnational governance of global health.

- by Catherine M. Jones and +1
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- Policy learning, Global Health Policy, Policy Process, Global Health Governance

This chapter aims to bring the study of ideas into the analysis of education policy and governance, and to explore their transfer, dissemination and feedback between the international and national policy making arenas. In a globalised education context, policy ideas about education often reflect changes in the dynamic relations between society and schooling – manifested for example in the pursuit of the knowledge economy as the future paradigm underpinning education reforms. Across Europe and other parts of the world, new policy ideas about education have driven major restructuring projects that dismantled older forms of schooling and welfare provision. Invariably, these have been replaced by new ways of defining education policy problems that draw on the market place as a new social and policy space where knowledge and policy solutions are contextualised and utilised differently to the norms of the past. The shifts in the assumptions about education policy knowledge and policy ideas, raise a number of interesting questions, such as, what produces policy changes in education systems and what is the influence of international actors? And, who are the agents of change in education reforms? Our ambition in this chapter is to connect some of these issues to the restructuring of Swedish education over the last 30 years. Sweden underwent a radical shift in the early 1990s from strong central state governing of education and very few private schools to a highly decentralized system promoting school choice and competition bet¬ween public as well as private actors. Based on generous vouchers and liberal authorization rules, the private school sector expanded at a high pace, particularly in the 2000s. Allowing profit-making without demands on re-investment in schools, education has increasingly attracted large limited liability companies – something that makes the Swedish case out¬standing in an international comparison (Lundahl et al. 2013; Alexiadou, Lundahl & Rönnberg 2019). In this chapter, we discuss if and to what extent the introduction and continuation of school choice and marketization policies in Sweden were guided by policy learning from external actors, in particular supranational organizations such as the European Union and the OECD.

- by nafsika alexiadou
- •
- Comparative & International Education, Policy learning, Sweden

The European Union may well be a learning organization, yet there is still confusion about the nature of learning, its causal structure and the normative implications. In this article we select four perspectives that address complexity, governance, the agency-structure nexus, and how learning occurs or may be blocked by institutional features. They are transactional theory, purposeful opportunism, experimental governance, and the joint decision trap. We use the four cases to investigate how history and disciplinary traditions inform theory; the core causal arguments about learning; the normative implications of the analysis; the types of learning that are theoretically predicted; the meta-theoretical aspects and the lessons for better theories of the policy process and political scientists more generally.

- by Claire Dunlop
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- European Union, Meta-Ontology, Policy learning, Learning Theory
- by Phil McManus
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- Economics, Australia, Neoliberalism, Policy learning

I first define what the term ‘big data’ means and consider where it fits within the already established ‘tools of government’. Section two examines the varied and increasingly plentiful sources of big data, and considers how the phenomenon is linked with the digital revolution that is still working its way through many civil society institutions, especially government agencies and the public sector. I next consider how social sciences’ methods of analysis need to change as a result of big data’s arrival. Section four considers how ‘big data’ could alter public policy-making, and yet may not do so as much as one might think, because of barriers and time lags in its use. The brief conclusions situate these substantial but differently-facing implications within a far longer-run tendency of modern ICT changes to be simultaneously centralizing and decentralizing in their implications.

Even if policy learning among themselves is more challenging for the pro-democracy forces in Central Europe than it is among their illiberal and autocratizing opponents, they should strive to do so better to enhance their political weaponry. As crucial elections near in Hungary and Poland, the lessons from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia can be more relevant for the opposition in the two countries than experiences from Western Europe. More generally, only if the pro-democracy forces start actively learning from and coordinating with each other do their countries have a chance at proper re-democratization. And, with this in mind, if U.S. or European actors restart their democracy assistance for the Central European countries, fostering such policy learning across the region should definitely be one focus of their efforts.

- by Daniel Hegedus
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- Democratization, Democracy, Policy learning, Central and Eastern Europe

Learning is decisive for successful problem solving in governance networks: it is by acquiring, interpreting and diffusing information that public and private actors build joint action and innovative policy solutions. Yet, little is known about the conditions that lead to learning in such context. Following the PRISMA approach, we systematically reviewed 40 public administration studies that provide evidence about the individual, interpersonal and structural conditions of learning in governance networks. We find that learning is conditioned to a balanced configuration of these characteristics, where too much of a single condition may be harmful. Still, some mixes of conditions appear more effective than others, especially the joint presence of trust between and diversity of participants, a skillful leader centrally positioned, and an appropriate blend of formal and informal institutional rules. We conclude with several avenues for future research.

- by Stéphane Moyson and +1
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- Leadership, Trust, Network governance, Social Network Analysis (SNA)

Smart specialisation (S3) is a place-based agenda for regional economic transformation. To that end, smart specialisation emphasises the importance of strategic thinking, good (multi-level) governance, existence of public institutions that are able to orchestrate fruitful discussion about the region’s future development trajectories as well as develop appropriate policy instruments and interventions, and finally engaged stakeholders that are willing to take an active lead in local development. In order to achieve these objectives, public institutions are required to learn constantly – explore, integrate and exploit knowledge acquired by individuals. The proposition of this study is to discuss if and how smart specialisation fosters policy learning and to provide some evidence on implementation of smart specialisation and associated policy learning opportunities in Visegrad Group countries.

- by Christos J Paraskevopoulos
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- Policy learning, Social learning

These two books present an overall spectrum of components that taken together constitute governance. Many problems of governance are embed-ded in learning and knowledge dissemination within the government before the challenges of policy... more

- by amita singh
- •
- Economics, Government, Political Science, Governance

In 1988, James Iain Gow surveyed public servants across Canada on how they access and utilize research from various sources and how that is linked to policy innovation. He documented this research in his book Learning from Others (1994). Thirty years later, we replicate selected parts of the original survey conducted by Gow, but also add an experimental dimension that tests how subjects respond to public service innovations from around the world. We randomly alter key features of those innovations to examine if public servants reveal patterns in the way they process these innovations and make judgements about their suitability or promise.

- by Carey Doberstein
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- Public Administration, Policy learning, Policy Diffusion, Policy Innovation

This essay asks how ideas help explain policy similarities and differences across countries. In what follows, I understand ideas to be “norms, frames and principled beliefs” (Campbell, 2002: 21). The scope is limited to ideas in the context of policy learning, with focus on gun control. I argue that policy learning helps to understand why policy outcomes vary cross nationally. The concluding remarks indicate that ideas, interests and institutions are extricably linked; although we can utilise one variable singularly to explain similarities or
differences, the three go hand-in-hand, highlighting the limits to explaining variances with just one variable.

- by Katrina Lavender
- •
- Political Culture, Policy learning, Comparative Public Policy, Gun Control

Policy actors involved in decision-making processes interact and gradually accumulate evidence about policy problems and solutions. As a result, they update their policy beliefs and preferences over time. This process of policy learning is consistent if policy preferences are aligned with any adaptations in beliefs about policy outcomes – a crucial condition of learning-induced policy changes. This article examines whether and when policy learning is consistent based on regression analyses conducted on data from a 2012 survey of 293 Belgian actors involved in the European liberalization policy process for the rail and electricity sectors. In line with the advocacy coalition framework, existing research has suggested that motivated modes of reasoning, such as selective exposure and biased assimilation, influence policy actors’ attitudes and behaviours. This study isolates the effect of biased assimilation on policy learning by demonstrating that when policy actors adapt their beliefs about policy outcomes, they do not necessarily align their policy preferences with those adaptations. Furthermore, biased assimilation is higher among politically curious actors, but their degree of commitment to the policy process does not appear to play a role. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

- by Stéphane Moyson
- •
- Policy learning, Policy Process, Policy Change, Advocacy Coalition Framework

Values and beliefs in Higher Education can be approached in a two-sided ways: as a by-product of its interaction with the many stakeholders, both from within and from outside its institutional space; as the role played by HE in the... more

- by Elizabeth Balbachevsky
- •
- Higher Education, Policy learning

Previous research refers to the influence of ideas and values on policy design as policy learning. For 25 years, the values and ideas of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) have influenced disability law and policy globally and, as several authors have emphasized, have served as inspiration in European antidiscrimination legislation. This article explores the influence of the ADA on disability policy learning in Europe and the European policy traditions that have defined policies regulating the accessibility of information and communication technologies (ICT) for persons with cognitive disabilities. It attempts to demonstrate that ADA policy values have influenced antidiscrimination legislation in the United Kingdom and Norway and that European policy traditions have shaped the extension of antidiscrimination legislation to ICT accessibility for persons with cognitive disabilities. Finally, this article seeks to provide a useful basis for further informing the implementation of the ADA.

What depth of learning can policy appraisal stimulate? How we can account for the survival policies that are known to pose significant countervailing risks? While heralded as a panacea to the inherent ambiguity of the political world, the proposition pursued is that policy appraisal processes intended to help decision-makers learn may actually be counterproductive. Rather than simulating policy-oriented learning, appraisals may reduce policy actors’ capacity to think clearly about the policy at hand. By encouraging a variety of epistemic inputs from a plurality of sources and shoehorning knowledge development into a specified timeframe, policy appraisal may leave decision-makers overloaded with conflicting information and evidence which dates rapidly. In such circumstances, they to fall back on institutionalised ways of thinking even when confronted with evidence of significant mismatches between policy objectives and the consequences of the planned course of action. Here learning is ‘single-loop’ rather than ‘double-loop’ – focussed on adjustments in policy strategy rather than re-thinking the underlying policy goals. Using insights from new institutional economics (NIE), the paper explores how the results of policy appraisals in technically complex issues are mediated by institutionalised ‘rules of the game’ which feed back positively around initial policy frames and early interpretations of what constitutes policy success. Empirical evidence from UK biofuels policy appraisal confirms the usefulness of accounts that attend to the temporal tensions that exist between policy and knowledge development. Adopting an institutional approach that emphasises path dependence does not however preclude the possibility that the depth of decision-makers’ learning might change. Rather, the biofuels case suggests that moves toward deeper learning may be affected by reviews of appraisal evidence led by actors beyond immediate organizational context with Chief Scientific Advisers (CSAs) within government emerging as potentially powerful catalysts in this acquisition of learning capabilities.

- by Claire Dunlop
- •
- Political Economy, Climate Change, Human Rights Law, Organizational Learning

During the economic crisis, youth unemployment grew exponentially in many European countries. It was argued that countries with a high level of firm involvement in the provision of initial vocational training were better equipped to address this problem. Boosting workplace‐based training was therefore seen as the right strategy to tackle unemployment. Using Denmark, Spain and the UK as case studies, this article analyses how countries with different skill formation systems have improved this type of training. While the UK reinforced the voluntaristic character of its training regime, Denmark improved the quality of its vocational education, and Spain made reforms to the training and apprenticeship contract. Interestingly, the countries achieved different results. To explain this divergence, it is argued that while the reforms made in the UK and Denmark were compatible with the national institutions and coordination mechanisms, this was not the case in Spain, where reforms were implemented in a non‐complementary way. Key Practitioner Message: After the economic crisis it was argued that countries with a high level of firm involvement in the provision of initial VET were better equipped to fight youth unemployment. The study analysed how countries with different skill formation systems improved this type of training and assessed their relative success. The article shows that when implementing reforms policy makers must take into account the institutions and mechanisms of coordination that prevail in each country. Otherwise, reforms may be unsuccessful.

- by Felix Hörisch
- •
- Education, Social Work, Political Science, Unemployment

During the last decades and especially after the Lisbon Strategy, issues of governance in education are crucial. EU has gradually mastered soft governed areas, mainly through the application of the Open Method of Coordination. Today, we are witnessing the overall domination of corset policies in education, in which the various educational partners, from nation states to institutions, seem to be willing to fit. On the other
hand, a new notion in EU educational discourse has prevailed during the last decade, namely that of competences, as an idea that includes knowledge, skills and attitudes in a dynamic of lifelong learning. The paper explores ideological perspectives of the competence society as it is perceived through EU papers of the last decade, as well as the way which this competence society is built through alignment. In this context
we link it to the creation of the “competence for self-government” of educational organizations and even education professionals, through setting goals, planning action, self evaluation, participating in networks and measuring achievement.
All the above are implemented from the national policy level to the level of the school. Therefore we try to explore the implementation of EU governance inside school, with the teachers playing a central role. We focus on projectization in education as a means of implementing educational change. For this to be realized we are investigating the role of teachers, namely the role of teachers as agents of change and of policy
implementation via projectization, which is possible through modes of evaluation, self evaluation, specific target setting and perfomativity. These all set new competences for teachers and call for the building of a new lifelong learning teacher in a school that functions as a learning organization. We conclude by arguing that such education professional can also understand, interpret and reflect on educational policy, and act
upon it, by customizing practices to the specific needs and capabilities of the national/local environment, the school community and his/her students accordingly.

While policy study of smart city developments is gaining traction, it falls short of understanding and explaining knowledge transfers across national borders and cities. This article investigates how transboundary learning occurs through the initiation and development of a regional smart cities network: the ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN). The article conducts an in-depth case study from data collected through key informant interviews and document analysis. Spearheaded by Singapore in 2017, ASCN is seen as a soft power extension for Singapore, a branding tool for ASEAN, and a symbiotic platform between the private sector and governments in the region. Most transboundary knowledge transfers within the ASCN are voluntary transfers of policy ideas. Effective branding, demand for knowledge, availability of alternative funding options, enthusiasm from the private actors, and heightened interest from other major economies are highlighted as facilitators of knowledge transfer. However, the complexity of governance structures, lack of political will and resources, limited policy capacity, and lack of explicit operational and regulatory mechanisms hinder transboundary learning. The article concludes that transboundary learning should go beyond exchanges of ideas and recommends promoting facilitators of knowledge transfer, building local policy capacity, encouraging collaborative policy transfer, and transiting from an information-sharing platform to tool/instrument-based transfer.

- by Araz 𝖳aeihagh and +1
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- Business, Management, Information Technology, Law

Abstract: In regard to the policy implementation, there are a few research at global level and differences about implementation model are very high. In this research, a missing ring, i. e., enhancement of capabilities and competencies of implementers of policy through policy learning is under consideration.
The research approach is based on quality research and grounded theory method. The population is experts who have been interviewed through theoretical sampling by deep interviews. In this method the researcher with a deductive approach and by the use of data prepares a reliable policy making theory. So after open coding, concepts and categories are extracted & will be put under the core category, causal conditions, context, intervening conditions and action and reaction strategies. Accordingly the main phenomenon is “policy learning”, and administrative system with characteristics such as “agility, quality and cheep public services, availability of services to the citizens, people’s satisfaction and satisfaction of employees” are the goals of the model. Also, based on force field theory, barriers and facilitator factors are identified.

- by Journal of Public Administration
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- Policy learning