by Bishoy L. Zaki
Understanding why policy actors do what they do and how their actions influence the public have always been fundamental questions in not only public policy but also public administration and governance scholarship. To address these questions, scholars rely on various approaches. Those approaches for example include viewing policymaking and governance to be outcomes of belief updates, power struggles, crisis induced shocks, political opportunity structures, and/or the rules and traditions by which public institutions operate, among others. These different approaches provide important insights into the world of policymaking and governance, albeit of course, within certain contexts and under particular conditions.
Among these different approaches, policy learning stands out as one of the most omnipresent and fundamental. Simply put, in this approach, we analyze, dissect, and even predict why policy actors do what they do by tracing how, when, and why they learn about policy and governance problems. The potency of the policy learning lens owes to several reasons, chief of which is that it allows us to peek into the kernel of policy actors’ behavior. This is rooted in the “Homo discentis” view of the individual, which sees people as “learning beings” who are constantly collecting information and knowledge within the context of rapidly changing environments. So, in a policy learning process, individual and collective policy actors pursue and process information and knowledge about emerging problems, in an attempt to develop understandings of potential viable solutions. This is while reconciling this information and knowledge with existing cognitive and institutional structures, and biases within various contexts. This renders policy learning – at heart – a problem solving activity. Hence, the idea of learning is normatively appealing, where all policy actors like to proclaim that their decisions are based on learning the ‘right lessons.’
Accordingly, policy learning is often hailed as a tool for helping policymakers make better policy decisions, ultimately creating value for the general public. But is this always the case? For years, existing research has done an outstanding job using a policy learning lens to analyze why and how policies change or do not change, and how it contributes to improvements in policy making and governance. However, scholarship only occasionally alludes to the unintended negative consequences of learning gone wrong. I therefore ask, is the story of learning always one of success, improvement, and glory?
My recent article explores the often-overlooked dark side of policy learning, demonstrating how learning failures can systematically lead to value destruction rather than value creation. Despite its normative appeal and origins, this article highlights that learning is not inherently positive. In fact, when misdirected, learning can also contribute to the erosion democratic values, weaken trust in institutions, and distort policy outcomes. To illustrate this, I conceptualized two main categories of learning failures that contribute to value destruction:
- Misdirected Learning Design Failures (non-intentional and cybernetic): These occur when policymakers genuinely attempt to solve problems but make errors in designing and undertaking the learning process. This is often facilitated by factors such as ambiguity and uncertainty underlying policy problems, or the influence of crisis shocks.
- Normative Failures (intentional and deontological): These happen when policymakers intentionally manipulate learning processes for political or self-serving goals, such as justifying unpopular policies, limiting public participation, or consolidating power.
In building a conceptual framework that links policy learning to value destruction, I demonstrate how these failures negatively impact both public values (i.e., norms and principles guiding policymaking and governance) (e.g., democratic participation, accountability, transparency) and public value (i.e., added value that citizens experience and receive through public products and services) (e.g., the effectiveness, and efficiency of public offerings).
Figure 1. From policy learning governance to value destruction.
First, let’s begin by looking at Misdirected Learning Design Failures. When policymakers must address complex and/or rapidly changing issues, they may rely on poorly designed learning processes–which could eventually cause the misidentification of solutions or the development of ineffective, or even harmful, policies. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the constraints of uncertainty and urgency often caused governments to undertake non-optimal learning, for example by mis-defining the policy problem at hand, excluding key stakeholders to be involved in the learning process, or misidentifying the optimal experts to learn from. These poor learning choices ultimately contributed to the loss of lives and livelihoods around the world.
Second, in Normative failures, we see for example when policy actors attempt to deliberately limit learning to a particular group of actors that are known to legitimize predetermined political agendas, or engage in political learning to sidestep democratic decision-making norms, or exclude certain demographics from government services. These failures tend to take place when malintended policy actors strategically leverage ambiguity, complexity, and urgency to steer learning towards self-serving outcomes.
My article ultimately challenges the assumption that learning always leads to better policies. By exposing the risks of learning failures, and theorizing failure types, it highlights the potential pitfalls of learning within the policymaking process and calls for stronger safeguards to prevent them. This is rooted in the idea that policy learning itself is a deliberately designed and governed process, where policy actors engineer how learning occurs, thus influencing its outcomes.
This serves as a crucial reminder that learning is inherently positive, and that without careful deliberate design and accountability, policy learning can just as easily contribute to value destruction as it can to value creation. To build on these theoretical developments, future research is encouraged to explore how different forms of governance (e.g., democratic vs. authoritarian) shape policy learning failures. It can also consider the increasing role of polycentricity and decentralization, and how learning therein contributes to value destruction at the subnational, national, and transnational levels.
Read the original article in Policy Studies Journal:
Zaki, Bishoy L. 2024. “ Hello Darkness My Old Friend: How Policy Learning Can Contribute to Value Destruction.” Policy Studies Journal 52(4): 907–924. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12566.
About the Author
Bishoy Louis Zaki is a professor of public policy and Administration at the department of Public Governance and Management at Ghent University, Belgium. His research and teaching focus on policy process theory with a focus on policy learning, and public management. He has several publications in leading international public administration and public policy journals including Public Administration Review, Policy & Society, Public Policy and Administration, the Journal of European Public Policy, Policy & Politics, Policy Design and Practice among others. He is also an editor at International Review of Public Policy journal, and a co-chair of the permanent study group on policy design and evaluation at the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA). Bishoy has over 14 years of experience in consulting, strategy, and policy where he served in different roles with several governments and international organizations worldwide. As a practitioner, Bishoy has overseen the design, implementation, and monitoring of large-scale international strategic capacity development, planning, and knowledge transfer initiatives.
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