Suchergebnisse

Advancing learning is a central tenet for improving public action. Recent calls for agility, robustness, prototyping and other strategies for coping with crises imply continual learning and improvement. This article contributes to challenging this ideal interpretation of the learning process. It provides conceptual and methodological tools to investigate the relationship between policy learning and policy change and sheds light on the diverse dynamics and types of learning that can emerge from crises. At the conceptual level, the article presents a learning matrix that classifies the possible outcomes in the relationship between learning and change. On methods, our research design includes process tracing, binary comparisons, and an innovative real-time approach to the study of learning. The article investigates three municipal case studies from the Italian food stamp programme implemented during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The repetition of the programme over a short period of time offers the opportunity to investigate inter-crisis learning, the process by which lessons from the first wave of implementation contributed to reforms in the second delivery. The coronavirus crisis magnified the acquisition of knowledge and provided radical inter-programme lessons – long-term, non-incremental learning beyond the management of the emergency. Yet, the findings also highlight how this window of opportunity for learning quickly closed and how certain lessons learned may be lost in the process of reform, hard to implement or are unlikely to be extrapolated across contexts.

AbstractFocusing on transboundary issues contributes to highlighting how new governance modes can emerge from increasing interdependence and complexity in public policies. This article analyzes food waste as a transboundary issue that cuts across different policy subsystems (PSs), intersects multiple levels of government, and calls into question consolidated policy making for new modes of governance. The analytical framework provides a multidimensional approach and a new typology of governance arrangements to be used in empirical research. Evidence from an Italian case study and an empirical investigation of 20 regional food waste programs shows that regions can adopt different driving ideas and can activate a variety of governance arrangements and differentiated, as well as viable, modes of integration between consolidated PSs. The article argues that different tool mixes combined with different levels of governance complexity may lead to a variety of governance arrangements and a differentiated likelihood of policy integration.

AbstractThis article analyses the institutional entrepreneurship within independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) as a variable explaining policy change over time and seeks to offer new insight for the identification and analysis of structure-agency relationships. The article contributes to the institutional entrepreneurship research agenda by connecting changes in IRA consumer protection policy to changes in agency leadership (specifically, agency presidents). The method used relies upon a quantitative and qualitative text analysis approach to connect and pinpoint structure-agency dynamics over time. The empirical sections compare and contrast the results obtained through the content analysis of the annual reports issued between 2000 and 2015 by the Italian Communications Authority (Agcom), and illustrate variations between periodic changes to Agcom's presidency and changes in ideas, strategies and tools in the field of consumer protection in the telecommunications sector.