This article uses the policy-oriented learning literature to provide practical insights on how to enhance the use of evidence by policymakers. After a short introduction to the field, this article presents four steps to understanding and responding to policy learning. First, all people interpret the world through the lens of their beliefs, and learn by combining heuristics and analytical processing. Second, people learn in different ways according to their roles. A novice would not be advised to learn about a specialist isue in the same way as a scientist. Instead, a modified communication strategy would be used to ensure understanding and uptake of evidence. Third, learning is a political process: we interact with our social environment and some actors-including entrepreneurs and brokers-influence the process more than others. Therefore, to encourage learning from scientific evidence we need to move beyond communication towards entrepreneurship and brokerage roles. In other words, policy-oriented learning is as much about interaction and leadership as information.
This article shows how particular rule configurations can create conditions for learning from experimentation on an operation level. It does so by using the IAD framework in a diagnostic analysis of decisions to fund the development of drainage in the Denver Metropolitan Area before and after the 2013 Colorado Flood. The discussion first synthesizes recent developments in this research area. Then, it demonstrates how formal institutional analysis can be used to address existing gaps. To conclude, recommendations for further research to develop our understanding of the link between learning and change are presented.
Governance networks that are affected by, and that must respond to, wicked problems, such as flooding, are highly complex. While we cannot capture all the social interactions that underly these structures, we can realistically describe this complexity from the perspective of the involved individuals. Thus, the article presented here addresses the question how to take into consideration the individuals' egocentric perspective in the analysis of governance networks that respond to wicked problems. In response to this question we offer concrete methodological guidelines for readers who wish to systematically map and compare egocentric networks. We demonstrate the usefulness of this template with an integrated analysis of the networks of four individuals who operate in a postflood governance context in Germany. We also present evidence that the template produces reliable data on the density, mutuality, and breadth of individuals' networks that support realistic and comparable descriptions.
The case study presented in this paper combines citation and discourse network analyses to explore entrepreneurial strategies and their long-term impact on public policy. The analysis draws on and develops previously published research that documents entrepreneurial influences on British road policy since the 1980s. Drawing in particular upon evidence presented in the 2013 Action for Roads White Paper, we conclude that it is not enough to focus research on a policy entrepreneur's capacity to mobilize a majority for policy change through skillful leadership and the strategic use of expertise and social capital to gain the expected benefits.Studies must also take into account the fact that once influential individuals may still impact legislation in an advisory capacity by focusing resources on a particular arena. More importantly, this strategy can, in the long term, explain why British road policy tends to remain relatively stable. K E Y W O R D Scitation analysis, entrepreneurial strategies, expertise, policy entrepreneur, policy impact
Public hearings are frequently used on all levels of government to systematically collect and analyze information in the early stages of legislative policymaking. The methods currently employed measure knowledge utilization in this context by means of citation analysis of edited articles and/or reports that summarize the information shared at these meetings. By combining citation analysis and social network analysis, this article develops a methodology that can be used to capture citations in transcripts of public hearings that precede these reports. In order to demonstrate its strengths and weaknesses, the method is utilized to analyze the 2009 hearings that informed the 2010 House of Commons Transport Committee report on developing the capacity of major roads in the United Kingdom to meet the country’s strategic transport needs. The research shows a good degree of consistency between two independent coders who employed this method to distinguish citations from non-citations and classify the data. It is concluded that the method can be utilized to reliably measure knowledge utilization at public hearings, and that it can be employed in conjunction with research that focuses on measuring citations in memos, briefings, articles or reports integrating some of the evidence given at these meetings.
This paper presents interdisciplinary research focusing on the municipality of Braunsbach in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, where, in May 2016, a flash flood attracted media attention and scientific scrutiny that highlighted the fact that certain aspects of flood risk were overlooked during earlier assessments conducted by the municipality, such as sediment transport. Using a network analysis and a focus-group discussion, we traced the flow of knowledge through the reported interactions between governmental, private, and academic actors in the two and a half years after the event. From our analysis, we learned that the extreme event attracted scientists to the formal and informal assessment of the hazard and the associated damages. Most importantly, we found conditions under which scientific scrutiny is not detached from but becomes integrated in a governance setting. While it is through this process that sediment transport has become an integral part of flood-risk management in Baden-Württemberg, with an evident impact on the measures already implemented, the impact of morphological changes, as well as large wood and sediment transport, have not been factored into the risk assessment as of yet. These variations in scientific impact on the assessment can be explained by decision biases that can occur when decision makers are under pressure to tackle vulnerabilities and thus lack the time to deliberate in a way that uses all the available evidence.
Efforts to collaboratively manage the risk of flooding are ultimately based on individuals learning about risks, the decision process, and the effectiveness of decisions made in prior situations. This article argues that much can be learned about a governance setting by explicitly evaluating the relationships through which influential individuals and their immediate contacts receive and send information to one another. We define these individuals as “brokers,” and the networks that emerge from their interactions as “learning spaces.” The aim of this article is to develop strategies to identify and evaluate the properties of a broker's learning space that are indicative of a collaborative flood risk management arrangement. The first part of this article introduces a set of indicators, and presents strategies to employ this list so as to systematically identify brokers, and compare their learning spaces. The second part outlines the lessons from an evaluation that explored cases in two distinct flood risk management settings in Germany. The results show differences in the observed brokers' learning spaces. The contacts and interactions of the broker in Baden‐Württemberg imply a collaborative setting. In contrast, learning space of the broker in North Rhine‐Westphalia lacks the same level of diversity and polycentricity.
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