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The chapter examines the dynamics of policy responses and their ultimate effectiveness. It identifies typical sequences of policy failures, caused by the misfit between new problems and existing policy legacies, which may generate processes of policy learning that ultimately produce effective solutions; but it also points to instances in which policy learning is blocked by conflicts of interest or by divergent cognitive orientations in multi‐actor institutional settings. Of equal importance are sequences of lateral spillovers, where the solutions to problems in one policy area generate new problems that subsequently must be dealt with in adjacent policy areas. In the 1970s and 1980s, these spillovers were most important in countries where the rise of open unemployment was mitigated by resort to early retirement and disability pensions. In analysing these sequences of policy failure, learning, and problem displacement, the chapter also compares and assesses the greater or lesser effectiveness of the policy responses actually adopted and identifies successful countries that were able to adjust to the challenges of the open economy without abandoning their welfare‐state goals.

This chapter on the national co-ordination of European Union (EU) policy in Italy discusses the frequent failures of Italian policies concerning the EU, which, in some cases, have become a European problem. Although other member states frequently face similar problems, there is a twofold difference between Italy and the other countries: first, of scale, and second of the nature of the interests concerned, since many of the complaints about Italy concern EU policies that provide Italy with financial benefits; a double contradiction thus arises between the interests of the EU and national interests. These problems raise two main questions: are the policy failures a consequence of treating European integration as a relatively minor issue in spite of the diffuse pro-integration attitude constantly shown by public opinion; or are they the result of the lack of co-ordination tools and processes at the institutional and political level in Italy? The chapter considers these questions in five main sections: The Failures of EU Policy-making in Italy (an identification and measurement of the problem); The Importance of the EU in Law and Policy-making in Italy; Inadequate Co-ordination as the Source of Italy’s ‘Failures’ in Europe; and European Policy Co-ordination: The Past, and The Present. The conclusion suggests that despite that centrality of concern for the EU in Italy, the country has been slow to create effective and efficient mechanisms for co-ordinating the formulation and implementation of EU law; although there have been some advances, fragmentation and duplication still appear to dominate.

This chapter provides an overview of policy learning and policy failure, both of which are classic topics of policy studies. The links between the two literatures appear obvious, yet there are very few studies that address how one can learn from failure, learn to limit failure, and fail to learn. This book offers a rare attempt to bring these two literatures together. The chapter then begins by defining policy learning and failure before organising the main studies in these fields along the key dimensions of processes, products, and analytical levels. Learning and failure studies are beginning to offer analysis in and for the policy process that concentrates on the prescriptive techniques that can help on the ground. Intellectual endeavours on the design implications of learning and failure are still in their infancy, but two streams of activity are making headway. For learning, analysis of international organisations makes particularly strong offerings on how governments should learn. Different instruments and methods for cross-national learning include: benchmarking, peer review, checklists, facilitated coordination, and extrapolation. Meanwhile, the prescriptive turn in failure studies is less concerned with how not to fail and more focused on its inverse — how to succeed in policy making.

This chapter studies the connections between repeated assessments of policy failure, the catalysts of deinstitutionalisation, and subsequent opportunities for system-wide policy learning and reform. Selected evidence from the reform trajectory of Australian health insurance policy from the mid-1970s to late-1990s is used to explore these possible relationships. Here, failure delegitimised health policy institutions, making them increasingly vulnerable and giving them weak learning capacity to reform in anything but a suboptimal way. The result is a cycle of failure and dysfunctional learning. The Australian health insurance case allows one to catalogue at least one pattern of the relationships between policy failure, deinstitutionalisation, and learning. Three core analytical arguments underpin this pattern. First, policy failures create opportunities for learning at a system-wide level, only after institutions have been eroded and exhausted by repeated failure. Second, this first claim holds in both the expert and political inquiry dimensions of policy failure. Third, learning processes are related to the particular sequence of deinstitutionalisation processes; in particular, initial deinstitutionalisation in the expert domain creates the conditions for political learning processes.

This chapter re-assesses some of the literature on policy transfer and policy diffusion, in light of ideas as to what constitutes failure, partial failure, or limited success. Rather than frame a policy transfer as a failure or success, scholars must recognise transfer (and so failure) as a messy process involving an array of meso-level actors. Two aspects are of particular note. First, the treatment of imperfect transfer as underscored by flawed lesson-drawing is useful as it takes one back to questions about the depth of learning. Second, the chapter highlights two aspects of learning that are often overlooked in mainstream accounts: ‘negative lesson-drawing’ and selective learning. Negative lesson-drawing is a quest to avoid policy failure where policy learning is not synonymous with policy adoption. Instead, policy lessons can help crystallise what ideas and policy paths decision-makers do not wish to follow.

This chapter explores how dysfunctional forms of policy learning impact policy failure at the meso-level. Using the long-running policy failure of the management of bovine tuberculosis (BTB) in England, analysis focuses on negative lessons generated by the interactions of an epistemic community of scientific experts and civil servants charged with balancing the competing interest actors to craft a workable policy. The chapter then outlines the capacity challenges faced by decision-makers engaged in epistemic learning and the ways in which advisory relationships can go wrong and learning can degenerate. These degenerations are understood as rooted in failures in government's organisational capacities. Empirically, the analysis of BTB policy in England finds that epistemic learning degenerated as a result of weaknesses in the government's analytical and communicative capacities. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the value of learning theories as a conceptual lens for policy failure.

This chapter examines situations in which the incentives of partisanship can encourage a government to actively seek to exacerbate an existing policy failure rather than to repair it. Under these circumstances, the certain benefits of shaming the political opposition outweigh any potential rewards of improving specific policy outcomes. The chapter considers two cases of policy failure in the late 1990s in the transportation sector. The first case explores an effort by the British Columbia Ferry Corporation (BC Ferries), a public provider of marine transportation on Canada's west coast, to introduce a fleet of high-speed aluminium catamaran ferries (the ‘fast ferries’). The second case investigates a public–private partnership scheme to build and operate an urban rail link between the central business district and the airport in Sydney, Australia (the Sydney Airport Link). In both cases, policy options were presented that had the potential to mitigate financial losses and to redirect the project back toward the achievement of stated policy objectives. However, these options were rejected by decision-makers in favour of actions that did nothing for the success of the project but that did deliver some short-term political and electoral rewards.

This chapter introduces the idea of ‘policy myopia’ as a pressing source of failure in policy making and explores the possibility of developing policies that learn to help mitigate its impacts. It notes that while the problem of bounded rationality and short-term uncertainty is widely acknowledged as the central existential condition for all policy making, the long-term problem of an uncertain, and sometimes unknowable, future is rarely acknowledged. As uncertainty deepens, so too does the probability of policy failure. In these circumstances, actors need to design policies with flexibility and adaptation built in. Where policy solutions are robust over a range of possible scenarios and over time, one can say policies have learning capacity organised into them. Yet, in cases of radical uncertainty, learning may not be possible (or indeed preferable) at all. This reminder of the limits of learning is important. Updating one's belief systems assumes that a certain amount of knowledge exists in the first place.

Offers a detailed institutional analysis of national grassland policy. It is demonstrated that one of the main reasons for the failure of national grassland policy and the pasture lease system is the fact that both do not suit the current socio-economic parameters. In other words, they are ‘empty institutions’. The ‘empty institution’ incorporates rules that have not yet been widely accepted in society, yet in such way that these can have no real impact on the behaviour of social actors. An ‘empty institution’ generally arises from a compromise over sensitive political issues. In this case, national grassland policy reflects a political compromise over the core of grassland property rights: the distinction between state and collective property.

Scholarly interest in implementation theory has waxed and waned despite enduring concerns with practitioner competences and the causes of policy failure or policy success. Attention to understanding and improving policy implementation needs to build on previous attempts to identify and absorb the lessons already known. Implementation processes often encounter governance challenges that were unforeseen, arising from difficulties in coordination of partnerships or from rapid changes in external events. This chapter reconsiders the role of implementation analysis in the era of governance, which sees implementation as joined-up networked practices discounts the significance of state capacity and centrality. The chapter recounts the manner in which implementation theory has evolved, from early instrumental accounts, to top-down, bottom-up and synthesised analysis, to current interest in the utility of implementation theory in addressing complexity of policy problems. It argues that, despite the shift in emphasis to governance-based and interpretive accounts, implementation as a structural and process challenge in government policy practice remains a vital concern. So do the problems of failure and success, learning and capacity, monitoring and evaluation that implementation theory has highlighted. Policy change agendas are foreshadowed, for further analysis in the following chapter.

The majority of psychologists interviewed emphasize the inherent difficulty in changing social policy—the barriers and challenges typically present, the mistakes made, and the lessons learned. This chapter first examines the different types of failures and defeats the psychologists interviewed experienced in the policy arena. Next, five major barriers that underlie such failures and defeats are highlighted: partisan politics, in the form of ideologies, values, and beliefs; corporate power, vested interests, and position power; issues of cost and budget; transitions and turnover; and implementation, scaling up, and challenges of systems change. The third section of the chapter delineates a number of more personal challenges experienced by those interviewed, including effective communication, scientific and personal integrity, weathering personal attacks, and time/work pressure. The chapter concludes with respondents sharing key lessons learned in the face of policy failures, defeats, mistakes, barriers, and personal challenges.

This chapter examines the spiral effect of policy failure relating to border controls. Comparable to events before 2001, when enhanced border controls increased the number of illegal immigrants and boosted the development of smuggling networks, there is strong evidence that post-9/11 policies have neither limited the number of illegal immigrants in Europe and the United States nor provided more security. Indeed, security-related immigration policies have undermined the ability of Western governments to bring border flows under control in two ways: by increasing the number of illegal immigrants who stay out of the reach of security controls, and by diverting scarce resources away from more-pressing security priorities. This chapter discusses the spillover effect of border escalation and the sociopolitical effects of the immigration policy failure. It argues that tighter controls have produced more demand for the service of smugglers and that more illicit activity has increased a pervasive sense of insecurity.

This chapter examines the growing politicization of border control policy in Europe. It first examines why the border has become important at all at a time when some have argued that borders are increasingly less relevant. The relatively easy movement of migrants into Europe until the 1970s was matched by the easy movement across the soft northern and southern borders of the United States at the same time. How, then, did the issue of the border become increasingly salient? This chapter argues that the developing political salience of the border has been the principle result, first of the reframing of the question of immigration by political party leaders as a failure by the state to control the challenge to identity. Party leaders and electoral competition have then mobilized public opinion around issues of border control as a political priority. This has taken place in the context of cross-border population movements within Europe, and by increased numbers of asylum seekers seeking entry into Europe.

The final chapter of the book reviews and synthesizes the key findings from the preceding chapters. The main general take-away conclusion from the book is that the federal government, and in particular the EPA, has not effectively integrated environmental justice considerations into decision-making as part of its core regulatory programs and activities. More broadly, the environmental justice policy reforms put in place in the mid-1990s, especially Executive Order 12898, failed to deliver on their promise of changing federal environmental decision-making. The reasons for this conclusion pertain to challenges specific to permitting, rule-making, enforcement and the other areas studied in the book as well as to several factors that cut across these areas. Specifically, three factors are identified as having impeded general progress: failure of the EPA to develop clear policy guidance, inadequate coordination across EPA regions and states, and inconsistent agency leadership. Although the book concludes with a sobering assessment of the limits to date of federal environmental justice policy, the author concludes that there is some reason for optimism in light of recent policy efforts at the EPA under Plan EJ 2014.

This chapter explores the underlying causes that brought about the financial crisis of 2008 down a path that does not involve bankers and home buyers. Although they both committed mistakes in the process that may have contributed to the collapse, the chapter positions them at the sidelines, stating that they are not the main drivers of the collapse. First, it considers two theories as to why interest rates fell and consequently rose in the early 2000s, one being the “global savings glut,” and whether the rise and fall in housing prices was really a bubble phenomenon. The chapter also talks about how the Federal Reserve can influence interest rates other than just the federal funds rate, and how this in turn influences economic activity. In conclusion, the chapter attributes the financial crisis to the root failure of monetary policy.

The CLASS Act was passed as part of the Affordable Care Act, yet the Obama administration later decided not to implement it. CLASS was supposed to address America’s serious problem with long-term care. But its viability was always in doubt. During health reform’s legislative drafting process, the design problems of CLASS spurred widespread, bipartisan allegations that the program amounted to what one Democratic senator called a “Ponzi scheme.” If CLASS was as bad as its detractors claimed, it is hardly surprising that the Obama administration decided to drop it. Rather, the surprise lies in how a program plagued by widely acknowledged design flaws managed to find its way into the Affordable Care Act in the first place. In seeking to understand how and why CLASS was designed in an unworkable manner, this book provides insight into how the contemporary policymaking process really works.

The chapter returns to the questions raised in the beginning of the book: how might we understand the self-generative character of bureaucracy? And what might we learn about how implementation works in general based on a discussion of this specific ethnographic study? Building on the insights developed in the previous four chapters it sets out to chart the systematic ways in which policy implementation fails. The chapter presents seven theses on how implementation works which it suggests can be observed in most if not all cases of policy implementation – be that national policy or international development policy.