Traveller’s guide to policy learning – Q&A with Associate Professor Alastair Stark (part 1)
IPAA Queensland friend and collaborator, Associate Professor Alastair Stark, recently released research with Dr Jenny van der Arend titled ‘The traveller’s guide to policy learning ’. This fascinating article breaks down the idea of policy learning using a ‘traveller’s guide’ and explores the way that lessons learned travel across time and space.
We took five minutes to sit down with Alastair to ask him a few quick-fire questions about his research, what he found, and some key learnings.
Check them out below and #keepinformed
Congratulations on your article. How did it come about? What is the genesis of the article?
I guess the starting point was my sense that in Queensland especially and particularly within the disaster management policy area, a lot of effort was being given to lesson learning.
We have a lesson management framework. We have quite a sophisticated understanding of what lesson learning is in certain regards and we have a lot of people working in that area and yet, despite this sophisticated community, despite these disaster management arrangements which are so well developed, and we still see repetitions of the past reappearing even though we’re desperately trying to learn lessons.
So I started to think why that is, and I started to look beyond the initial moments of learning to the stages beyond that when lessons are published, to look at really what happens in the life of a lesson.
Your article talks about policy learning. How can we explain that to a practitioner or someone that has never really heard that term?
Policy learning is really a simple perspective that encourages us to look at a couple of steps.
The first step is the individual and the Eureka moment, the moment of cognitive enlightenment and that’s universal. There’s public servants around the world learning things daily from a whole host of different mechanisms, different processes, and they have moments where they have a change in their thinking.
But really what policy learning research tries to do is map the journey from that initial moment through to organisational change. So it goes from individual learning to collective learning, the learning of a group and that’s organisational learning.
And then the final stage that we’re concerned about is a macro stage and more social or systemic stage where a lesson can go from an organisation around a larger system or a service or a community. And so policy learning isn’t fixated necessarily on different types of learning. It doesn’t fixate on, for example, evidence based learning or formative learning. It looks at all different types of learning.
We’re always concerned with trying to understand the connection between the individual, the organisation and the system and what changes.
You introduce the idea of dynamic capacity. What does that mean?
Dynamic capacity is simply the ability of a learned lesson to move.
We often think that lessons speak for themselves in a way which will ensure that they can move around a system.
If I have a wonderful lesson and I tell lots of people, the assumption is that they will then act on it. And of course, one of the major problems we see, particularly in terms of disaster management but in other areas too, is that we continually identify lessons. We speak them or publish them, but action doesn’t follow. So when we think about dynamic capacity, it opens up a different world.
Why do lessons move and why do they not move? What are the barriers preventing movement and what are the facilitators that get them moving?
And when we do that, we open up a whole new world in terms of different perspectives. The policy job becomes about persuasion, it becomes about translation, it becomes about convincing others to act on your good idea. And that’s all about dynamic capacity.
We can see a lessons good, good quality in terms of what it’s asking us to do, but does it have the capacity to move and convince?
So there is a strong, large, diverse network of practitioners working in the disaster management space. When it comes to the dynamic capacity of learnings that come off the back of disasters, are you talking about learnings travelling within that system or more broadly?
Within that system is an example of policy more broadly. It’s true to say that in disaster management there’s a much greater willingness to engage lesson learning processes then perhaps after disasters are much greater willingness to change and reform.
So it’s kind of low hanging fruit in terms of the analysis because there’s a willingness to think about learning within it.
But again, what we see even within this community where people really want to learn and really want lessons to have effects and really want reforms to change and improve, we still see these issues of lessons not moving. The easiest example is a lesson created in southeast Queensland that has to go to a disaster management officer and a Regional Council.
You know, that’s a simple example of a lesson that’s really unlikely to travel, and it’s likely to be killed off in the regions without much fanfare. And it will slowly die because it doesn’t respect the context within which it has to be implemented. And so it’s really relevant, this community to think not just about lesson learning in one place and one time, but lesson learning across levels of government, federal to state to local council, but also lesson learning that involves non state actors, non government actors. You know all the journeys up and down, and beyond all these jurisdictions and borders. They’re unique and different.
What were the top 5 travellers tips emerging from this research? Read part 2 here.
The full article is available on open access here: Stark, A., & van der Arend, J. 2023. The traveller’s guide to policy learning . Journal of European Public Policy.
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