The lessons of failure: learning and blame avoidance in public policy-making

Abstract

Recent studies by Hood have underscored the significance of the desire of decision-makers to avoid blame for poor policy initiatives, highlighting the importance to policy-making of learning about how best to avoid policy failure. This article examines several different concepts of policy failure in the literature on the subject, such as policy accidents, errors, mistakes, and anomalies, along with recent work by McConnell and his colleagues on the general types and sources of such failures. The article distinguishes between 'thin' (technical-strategic) and 'thick' (political-experiential) policy learning and links them to McConnell's three categories of political, programme, and process failures. The analysis points to the significant and underappreciated roles played by process and political problems in the analysis of policy failure and the need to draw lessons in these areas as well as in more technically oriented programme-related ones if the prospects of policy success are to be enhanced. Introduction: policy knowledge and policy failureWhat kinds of learning contribute to enhanced policy outcomes or 'policy success' and under what circumstances? Despite the plethora of work on policy learning in the policy studies literature over the past several decades, both the independent variables (those factors that drive or contribute to learning and non-learning) and the dependent variable itself (what it is that constitutes learning) are unclear and often mis-or underspecified in many studies on the subject (Radaelli, 2009). This has led to some confusion and, especially, some difficulties in compiling the results of various studies of policy learning into a coherent and consistent set of principles that can be applied to specific problem areas in order to develop better policies, that is, ones more likely to succeed.Evaluating the existing literature on these two subjects (policy learning and policy success and failure) and better integrating them is the main purpose of this article. It moves the discussion of both subjects forward by examining and clarifying the logic and rationales behind several different

Adaptation of forest management to climate change as perceived by forest owners and managers in Belgium

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“…Suffice to say that the entire line of research discussed here makes it clear that researchers of alleged failures, fiascos, blunders and messes of governments' labour have an obligation to be methodical, transparent and clever in how they position themselves vis-à-vis these quintessentially political acts of applying synthetic labels to often complex, ambiguous, changeable realities of performance and reputation. Howlett (2012) has made several important recent additions to the analytical repertoire of students of policy failure that can help in this endeavour. He observes, first of all, that one should distinguish between policy failures born out of ill will and malevolence, such as studied in the literature on state crimes (De Haven-Smith 2006), and those that arise inadvertently.…”