Public policy research is rife with questions about policymaking processes and outcomes. Yet, perhaps none as quintessential as – why do policy actors do what they do? In my recent article published in Policy & Politics, I explore this question through the lens of policy learning. In the early days of policy sciences, this question was predominantly answered from a lens of “powering”. This meant that policymaking was largely understood as an outcome of power struggles between competing factions, with winners and losers. Subsequently, pioneers of contemporary policy sciences such as Harold Lasswell, Karl Deutsch, John Dewey, and Hugh Heclo, among others, paved the way for a different explanatory lens: “puzzling”. In this view, rather than only competing for power, what drives and fuels policymaking is also actors’ puzzling or wondering about how to solve policy problems, in other words, how they “learn” in an attempt to develop solutions to emerging problems. This gave rise to what is now known as the discipline of policy learning, focused on policy actors’ pursuit, and processing of policy related information and knowledge in an attempt to find solutions to different policy problems. This is not limited to technical problems like healthcare, natural disasters, technology, and the economy, but also includes political and social challenges.
This puzzling lens substantively contributed to our understanding of the policy process, helping us better answer the questions of why policy actors do what they do, and why the policy process behaves this or that way. Theoretical developments over the past decades helped advance policy learning to the ranks of policymaking ontologies. i.e., positioning it as a fundamental behaviour and omnipresent process that shapes policymaking. These theoretical developments materialised across various ontological-epistemological approaches from mechanistic, positivist, interpretivist, to social constructivist.
However, despite the fact that puzzling was initially conceived as a supplementary (not an alternative) understanding to the then-dominant powering-based view of policymaking, a schism between puzzling and powering perspectives in policy learning literature has grown over the decades, rendering them almost mutually exclusive. As a result, the predominant view of agency in policy learning research has followed through this trend, becoming rather learner centric. This mainly focused on how policy actors exercise their agency as learners of policy lessons. For example, the research in this area expounds how actors pursue and process information and knowledge about policy problems, how their beliefs, biases, and cognitive structure influence what they learn and what lessons come out of this learning process. However, little attention has been paid to how policy actors exercise their agency and deploy their power to shape and direct the policy learning process, in other words, the influence of powering within the puzzling process.
In my recent article “Policy learning governance: a new perspective on agency across policy learning theories”, I address this gap by conceptualising and theorising the concept of “policy learning governance”. Policy learning governance is the deliberate process by which policy actors strategise, design, and govern policy learning processes towards achieving technical or political objectives. Within this context, governance can be understood as an objective-oriented exercise of agency. There, an ‘agent’ exercises power, or authority to direct an interdependent set of resources (including rules, institutional setups, actors, capacities and so on) in a dynamic setting towards achieving certain policy objectives. Transposing this into a policy learning context, a governance-centred view of agency accounts for how policy actors exercise their power to adjust the learning resources (parameters, institutional setups, capacities) to achieve their policy objectives. In this view, policy learning is positioned as a design process where policy actors are not only learners but can also act as stewards and governors of a continuously evolving policy learning process. The three action words in the conceptualisation of policy learning governance conveniently span the three key phases of the policy learning process – strategising: taking place at the initiation of learning processes; designing: taking place during learning planning and establishment of learning processes; and governing: taking place as objective oriented adjustments during the learning process in response to changing conditions.
Having said that, what is governed in this learning governance process?Agency and power are exercised by adjusting configurations of the key dimensions or key constitutive elements of the policy learning process (actors involved, information and knowledge, systems and structures, policy issue formulation). So, what might these interventions look like in practice? For example, as regards the actors’ involved, governing policy actors can exclude or include individual, organisational, or institutional actors to upgrade, degrade, or reshape learning capacities. It can also adjust the degree of formal authority of individual, organisational, or institutional actors. As regards the information and knowledge dimension, governing actors can identify certain types of evidence and information as relevant or correct, considering pre-established and favourable policy positions, enabling information flows from epistemic groups based on their beliefs, cognitive and informational preferences. As regards the systems and structures dimension, governing actors can externalise or internalise learning structures to ensure political or technical objectives are achieved, or reformulate organisational and institutional mandates, structures and values underlying learning. Last but not least, as regards policy issue formulation, power can be exercised to reformulate policy issues, and policy objectives to redirect from whom to learn, and what constitutes successful learning outcomes.
In this article, I’ve tried to propose a supplementary perspective to agency in policy learning literature, one that systematically recognises the role of powering within puzzling. In doing so, improving our understanding of how policy learning leads to certain outcomes by accounting for how policy actors exercise power to manipulate key elements of the learning process.
Advancing the perspective of policy learning governance reconciles the growing dichotomy of powering and puzzling by illustrating how political power is accumulated and wielded to shape and direct policy learning to achieve different actor group objectives. This supplements the incomplete model of agency across different conceptual approaches to policy learning, where the issue of ‘who prompts action’ is scarcely acknowledged. Doing so helps advance the purely organic learner-centred view of policy learning outcomes towards a more comprehensive understanding of how and why key constitutive elements of the learning process (such as information and knowledge, actors involved, and learning structures) interact leading to specific outcomes. On a practical level, cultivating findings on how policymakers shape and direct policy learning processes, and the normative (quality) implications of these interventions, helps provide insights on how effective policy learning processes can be designed and implemented. Furthermore, approaching policy learning as a deliberate design practice sheds light on implicit cognitive and organisational biases that constitute barriers to effective learning. This can be particularly helpful in cases of protracted and emergent learning episodes such as in social learning.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Zaki, B. L. (2024). Policy learning governance: a new perspective on agency across policy learning theories. Policy & Politics, 52(3), 412-429 from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000018
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read our latest Special Issue articles on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis:
Policy beliefs, belief uncertainty, and policy learning through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework
Matthew Nowlin
Policy and organisational learning in judicial reform: evidence from Italy
Jonathan C. Kamkhaji and Giancarlo Vecchi
The relative effects of diversity on collective learning in local collaborative networks in Belgium
Nadège Carlier, David Aubin and Stéphane Moyson
Types of learning and varieties of innovation: how does policy learning enable policy innovation?
Nihit Goyal and Michael Howlett
How do governments learn from ad hoc groups during crises? From SARS to COVID-19
Sreeja Nair and Akshat Garg
Why policy failure is a prerequisite for innovation in the public sector
Philipp Trein and Thenia Vagionaki
You may also be interested to read an earlier article by the same author:
Zaki, B. L., & Wayenberg, E. (2023). How does policy learning take place across a multilevel governance architecture during crises?. Policy & Politics, 51(1), 131-155. Retrieved Jul 10, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16680922931773
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