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.