LIST OF PANELS

This panel asks the following questions: What are the connections between policy learning and policy change? What institutional, social and individual factors do stimulate policy learning? Which learning outcomes do they elicit? Does learning cause policy change? Does policy change induce policy learning? What are the cognitive and social processes between the factors of policy learning and policy change? How can effective policy learning be promoted in policy processes? This panel is organized in the context of an international special issue project to be submitted to the Policy & Society Journal. The panel proposal is submitted under the subject category “Public policy, administration and policymakers”, sponsored by this Journal. The panel includes an introductory paper and a number of individual papers that bring original empirical case studies on the role of policy learning in policy dynamics as well as theorize the relation between policy learning and change from different policy science perspectives. The following perspectives are already represented in our project: network theory, advocacy coalition framework, frame analysis, co-creation processes, evidence-based policymaking and epistemic communities. Even if we do not exclude to host other paper/s that are anchored in one of those perspectives, we mostly welcome papers that represent other policy perspectives considering the role that learning do or do not play in policy change (e.g., socio-cognitive institutionalism, cultural theory, policy learning and transfer or diffusion, etc.)

Scholarly attention devoted to policy learning has increased significantly during the past three decades (Loeber, 2008). Indeed, politics is not only the archetypical realm of power relations but also a sphere where ideas are created, assimilated, organized, and politicized to reduce uncertainties about society (Heclo, 1974; Walker, 1969, 1974; Zito & Schout, 2009). One of the most often invoked reasons for scrutinizing policy learning is the role that policy learning plays in policy change. Human learning, arguably, is a fundamental intermediate factor of change processes. Eliciting change requires actors to create or to deal with new information and new experiences. This process results in the enduring acquisition or modification of abstract constructs (Corsini, 1999; Schacter, Gilbert, & Wegner, 2010; VandenBos, 2007). Those alterations, in turn, transform actors’ behavioral intentions as well as their reactions and contributions to change (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010). Various studies demonstrated that policy learning is actually connected, in one way or another, to policy change (e.g., McBeth, Shanahan, Arnell, & Hathaway, 2007; Munro, 1993). Nevertheless, many other researchers do still have doubts about the role of policy learning in policy change (e.g., Eberg, 1997; Nohrstedt, 2005; Oliver & Pemberton, 2004; Sabatier, 1993). Major changes of policy frames may also occur without being followed by policy change (Scholten, 2011). Hence, it is still unclear in which conditions which types of policy learning result in which forms of policy change. This panel asks the following questions: What are the connections between policy learning and policy change? What institutional, social and individual factors do elicit policy learning? Which learning outcomes do they elicit? Does learning cause policy change? Does policy change induce policy learning? What are the cognitive and social processes between the factors of policy learning and policy change? How can effective policy learning be promoted in policy processes? The main assumption of this panel is that the theoretical debate about the connections between policy learning and policy change results from a focus of each policy sciences perspective on different types of actors, knowledge, and processes of learning. Hence, this panel includes papers examining the relations between policy learning and policy change from different policy sciences perspectives. This will allow pushing the theoretical dialogue on policy learning one step further. Policy learning is conceptualized in very different ways in different schools of thought, within policy sciences (Bennett & Howlett, 1992; Dunlop & Radaelli, 2013). The objectivist perspective, for example, has given an increasing attention to the need and role of information and evidence in policy processes (Parsons 2002; Sanderson 2002). Individual learning involves the acquisition of new knowledge and/or skills regarding the policy at stake (Lachapelle & Montpetit, submitted for publication). Some research borrowing from neo-institutionalism as well as cognitivism has framed policy learning more as a social process. For instance, with Schon and Rein (1994), “critical frame reflection” is situated in – and conditioned by – the institutional setting of actors. Constructivists have often taken a more deliberative approach to policy learning, being critical of opportunities to cognitive policy learning (e.g., Hajer, 1995, 2003). Others have adopted a political and critical perspective on the balance between “powering” and “puzzling” (Hall, 1993; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993). In addition to this conceptual question, there are methodological challenges related to the empirical analysis of policy learning. How to collect data about learning? How to measure learning? Often, the methods used to operationalize policy learning are even not enough specified (as argued by Weible, Sabatier, & McQueen, 2009). The perspectives on policy change are more clearly defined and differentiated, probably because data on policy change can be collected and analyzed more easily. To be connected with policy learning, however, policy change also requires a fine conceptualization and operationalization. To stimulate the comparison among policy sciences perspectives, panel participants connect their analysis to a common analytical framework based on three of the most advanced developments regarding the conceptualization of policy learning and policy change. First, Bennett and Howlett (1992) distinguished a set of three questions that most policy perspectives still use nowadays to situate forms of policy learning: Who Learns? Learns what? And to what effect? The “who” and “what” questions will allow drawing the empirical context of each individual paper, i.e. the actors and content involved in policy learning and change. As far as the effects of policy learning are concerned, the focus of this panel is policy change. Second, Dunlop and Radaelli (2013) have recently published an important contribution to the organization of the conceptual “minefield” of policy learning research. They observe that each theoretical perspective has its own view on the conceptualization and measurement of policy learning, which excludes other views and hides possible effects of policy learning on policy change. Dunlop and Radaelli (2013)'s typology of learning processes allows to illuminate and address this problem. Third, the underestimation of the effects of policy learning can also result from our classical approaches of policy change. Hence, Howlett and Cashore (2009)’s conceptual clarification of policy change will be used because, they argue, this clarification allows to capture a wider set of policy dynamics.