When policy lessons don’t speak for themselves – a “traveller’s guide” for practitioners of policy learning
Policy lessons don’t travel on their own - a lot goes into helping them from their place of origin to new homes (or stopping them from getting there). Drawing on research with disaster management personnel in Queensland, Dr Jenny van der Arend (@JennyvdA) and A/Prof Alastair Stark distil a ‘traveller’s guide’ of practical insights for policymakers who want to help lessons from place to place. The post is based on their new article in the Journal of European Public Policy (which is free to read until October 2023).
Often in policy learning practice we assume that lessons well-captured and disseminated will inspire effective implementation. We can be both surprised and frustrated when we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. This is in spite of the abundance of work that highlights how policy learning is relational in nature, involves meaning making and is influenced by structural power.
Photo by Liu Revutska on Unsplash
Reflecting on policy learning in practice, it seems obvious that every lesson generated in one time and place needs to be acted upon by others in a different time and place if it is to have effect. This would suggest that the extent to which a lesson can facilitate behavioural change is shaped also by its “dynamic capacity” – that is, its ability to travel across time and space, to receive acknowledgement and active support from would be implementers, and to absorb downwards into the institutional fabric of a policy space in ways that preserve it across time.
We sought to explore these ideas about the “dynamic capacity” of policy lessons via interviews undertaken to map lesson learning practice in disaster management in Queensland. Disaster management is a policy area in which ideas, policies and actors are highly focused on lesson-learning – the ability to learn from one disaster event to another is critical to enabling disaster situations to be managed safely and effectively.
The insights we derived around the barriers that can restrict a lesson’s freedom of movement, and the strategies that practitioners can use to get them moving, prompted us to develop our “traveller’s guide” for policy learning practice. Read on for our travel tips…
Getting over travel fears
Within organisations there can often be a hesitancy to be self-critical in generating and documenting lessons for fear of criticism and blame. Risk aversion also acts as a strong disincentive for sharing lessons beyond organisational boundaries, limiting broader learning. There are two key tips for dealing with travel fears:
In generating lessons, identify successes and communicate about challenges and failures in “no-blame” ways.
Build relationships and generate trust through these – relationships can create safety when it comes to sharing experiences and lessons.
Knowing your destination
Failure to consider the implementing context when generating policy lessons creates a second barrier to dynamic capacity. Lessons that do not seem relevant will often be ignored by the people you’re trying to reach. Further, if the steps, stages and functions of learning that need to exist beyond the publication of a lesson are not considered, the way forward may not be as clear as it needs to be.
Several travel tips can be identified to help here:
Lessons need to be generated in a co-constitutive manner so that implementers are assured that the lessons are sensitive to their context.
In situations in which networks of differentiated actors are required for implementation, there is value in thinking about outcome orientated recommendations, rather than more specific processes and goals.
Knowledge of a destination can be used to create forms of communication that are different from the typical report and recommendation format, including more interactive forums (for example, workshops; “roadshows”; online discussion forums) and more accessible documents (for example policy and practice briefs; lay summaries; visual/video abstracts). These may be more persuasive about the need for action with implementing actors.
The importance of translation
If a lesson is being propelled by persuasion (i.e. from those who have learned and want others to know), there is a need to recommunicate lessons within and across organisations in ways that reconcile meanings and create value and support across audiences.
The travel tip here is that when lessons move across multiple policy audiences, they are (and need to be) translated and reinterpreted, which is only possible to do well when the destination is clear:
The effective translation of policy lessons requires interactive forms of communication that are simple and outcome focused, and promote agency.
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Finding good accommodation
Many lessons begin a journey but never find an accommodating host. Our research respondents offered many reasons to explain why implementers reject lessons. Lessons didn’t always fit neatly within existing responsibilities, structures and processes, meaning that they could fall through the gaps. Lessons that seemed too difficult found their way to the ‘too hard basket’. Finally, lessons made their way to hosts who recognised their relevance and usefulness, but lacked the capacity to accommodate them.
The travel tip that we offer here does not include a magic bullet to attract more resources for policy lessons, but it can enhance the dynamic capacity of a lesson:
Lessons will be better able to find good accommodation if they were formulated with a greater understanding of the capacities that do (and do not) exist amongst implementers.
The long-term stay
Once support for a lesson has been found and implementing action ensues, the lesson needs to stop moving, put down anchor and settle in. Amongst our disaster management interviewees, a range of strategies to do just this were outlined. These came in the form of the codification of lessons into disaster management plans, staff training that uses ‘the stories’ of past events and the use of regular exercises as a means of keeping disaster lessons present within organisational agendas.
These practical responses lead us to our final travel tip:
The long-term institutionalisation of policy lessons requires them to be embedded through formal encoding and cultural remembering.
Our “traveller’s guide” suggests that there is a need to anticipate the diversity of reactions to new lessons in a policy space and to think about the institutional characteristics that hold well-meaning actors back when they open their minds to new ideas. Most importantly, policy learning practitioners need to use this knowledge to support implementers through a lesson-learning episode.
Our published paper is available to read open access until October.
Post based on: Stark, A., & van der Arend, J. (2023). The traveller’s guide to policy learning. Journal of European Public Policy, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2023.2243997
Moderated by @DrSophieYates