The traveller's guide to policy learning

ABSTRACT

This article claims that when it comes to policy learning success, the most important variables are those that influence how well a learned-lesson travels. Consequently, it offers a ‘traveller's guide’ to policy learning. The guide begins with the presentation of a new concept that we have labelled ‘dynamic capacity’ which aims to capture the ways in which learned lessons need to move across time and space and consolidate downwards into the institutional fabric of a policy system. Interview data generated from lesson-learning actors in a specific policy community is then presented as a means of outlining the variables that prevent policy lessons from moving, and the strategies that might give them momentum. The hope is that this traveller's guide can help us build better theories of policy learning and encourage more effective learning practices that better recognise the ‘others’ who may not generate policy lessons, but greatly influence their impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy learning
• lesson-learning
• crisis management
• policy travel

Introduction

We can begin our own journey with a claim that that might be controversial to some, which is that the most important variables that affect policy learning success have little to do with the fundamentals of learning. We might think, for example, that the generating factors that go into the creation of a lesson in the first instance are what counts. Surely it is the quality of the evidence and the analysis, the spark of cognitive enlightenment that they encourage, and the production of a valid and generalisable lesson that matter most when it comes to policy learning effectiveness? This article suggests not. It argues instead that when it comes to effectiveness there are a series of more important variables that surround learned lessons and influence their dynamic capacity. This capacity is our central focus, and we define it here initially in terms of the ability of a lesson to move across space and time and receive active support from those who have the authority to implement it.

This travel guide has three objectives for those who are interested in lesson-learning journeys. First, it presents the concept of dynamic capacity in theoretical terms and shows its centrality to understanding processes of policy learning. This centrality, we argue, stems from the fact that after an individual has had their moment of enlightenment, every policy learning act thereafter is relational in nature, which means that all policy learning activities are influenced by dynamic capacity. As we will show, accepting this (re)conceptualisation has profound implications for the specific community of policy learning scholars who are gathered in this special issue because it can provide policy learning theory with a much-needed link between the individual (micro) and the collective (meso) levels of learning within government (see Dunlop & Radaelli, 2013, 2017, on the need for connections in this regard). However, we must be clear from the outset that our theoretical contribution does not emerge from the novelty of our concept, or the fundamental ideas that are packed within it. Many of the relational aspects of policy that are discussed here, and indeed the travel metaphor deployed throughout, have been used before, either by critical policy scholars who have explored the concepts of translation, assemblage, and policy mobility/mutation (Clarke et al., 2015; Freeman, 2009; Kingfisher, 2013; Peck & Theodore, 2012) or by those who have been concerned to engage in studies of policy learning with cognisance of its inherently complex, iterative and altogether messy reality (Elliott & Macpherson, 2010; Moyson et al., 2017; Stark, 2018). Instead, our goal here in theoretical terms is much more modest as we aim to use the concept of dynamic capacity to consolidate thinking about the movement of policy, to add to it in certain respects and then to show its value when analysing lesson-learning within government. In doing so, we hope to show policy learning scholars that their fixation with the generative moments of learning has come at a price, which is registered in a lack of understanding of what happens after a lesson is identified and made public.

Second, the article underscores the importance of dynamic capacity when thinking about policy learning effectiveness, which is registered through the ability of a lesson to encourage behavioural change. This objective was pursued empirically and facilitated here through the presentation of data that identifies the barriers that can restrict a lesson's freedom of movement and the strategies that practitioners can employ to get them moving. The data comes from interviews with lesson-learners who operate within a disaster management policy community, and it shows how the variables that constitute dynamic capacity surround a lesson and influence the extent to which it is implemented. We make this claim because our data shows how explanations of failure and success tend to be located in narratives that depict and evaluate the relationships that surround a lesson after it has been identified. These environmental variables are still largely underappreciated by policy learning scholars, however, because they have little to do with those generative moments which are assumed to represent the sine qua non of policy learning. Nevertheless, we contend that it is the factors that affect dynamic capacity that represent the most important determinants of policy learning success.

Finally, the article discusses the implications of these arguments for the practitioners of policy learning. If we are correct about the importance of dynamic capacity, we ought to encourage these practitioners to move away from an exclusive focus on lesson-drawing and reject the assumption that lessons speak for themselves (and therefore travel easily). Instead, practitioners need to devote more time to better understanding others who are not involved in the creation of lessons but remain crucial to their realisation. From this view, policy learning becomes more about: understanding the capacity and context of would-be implementers, anticipating the reactions of the various actors in a policy space to new lessons, thinking about the institutional characteristics that hold well-meaning actors back when they open their minds to new ideas and, most importantly, using this knowledge to support these actors through a lesson-learning episode. It is this kind of policy work, we argue, which will determine the extent to which identified lessons properly become learned lessons and, subsequently, encourage behavioural change in others. Ultimately, this all means that practitioners ought to view lesson-learning as an exercise in persuasion through which autonomous actors are convinced about the salience of an identified lesson.

The remainder of the article facilitates these three objectives. We first introduce the concept of dynamic capacity in theoretical terms before setting out the methodology used to generate our data. Thereafter, we present the data that shows the many barriers that prevent policy lessons from travelling and the ways in which those barriers can be manoeuvred around. We present this data in the form of a travelling guide that is written for those who need to send their lessons out beyond their own organisational borders and into the policy world and for policy learning scholars who need to better understand that process.

Lesson-learning travel and the concept of dynamic capacity

We define dynamic capacity in terms of three attributes and we argue throughout this article that these attributes significantly influence the extent to which a lesson can facilitate behavioural change. Thus, dynamic capacity is a concept that aims to capture:

The ability of a lesson to 1) move across space in ways which take it through organisational borders; 2) receive acknowledgement and active support from would-be implementers, and 3) absorb downwards into the institutional fabric of a policy space in ways which preserve it across time.

At the heart of this concept is a simple fact, which is that every lesson generated in one time and place needs to be acted upon by others in a different time and place if it is to have effects. This means that dynamic capacity is relevant to all forms of policy learning regardless of context. Let us go on a brief journey to illustrate this point and emphasise the three attributes defined above. We can begin by peering into an office window through which we see an individual public servant performing a policy analysis role in a government department. If that individual has their ‘eureka moment’ and learns something which they believe is important, they will not keep it to themselves. Instead, they will tell their immediate colleagues all about it in the hope that they too will learn and then support that lesson's dissemination. From this moment onwards, the lesson is on the move, and our conceptual focus has shifted from individual to organisational learning. In the parlance of policy learning theory, we are seeing the shift from micro-level (individual) learning to meso-level (collective) learning (Dunlop & Radaelli, 2017). If we were to observe the nature of the communication that was occurring in that office, we would see that the lesson is being propelled by persuasion (from those who have learned and want others to know) and received in ways which reinterpret it (as those who are absorbing the lesson for the first time translate it into their own thoughts and behaviour). These characteristics – persuasion, reinterpretation, and most importantly translation – are indispensable to understanding how policy travels because it is neither transferred nor transmitted as a unified entity but rather deconstructed, reconstructed and negotiated through a complex process of collective meaning making that is intrinsic to all policymaking communication (Freeman, 2009; Kingfisher, 2013). The sum of these complex translatory dynamics can be understood through the concept of ‘assemblage’ in which new and old policy framings are woven together into new understandings. Thus:

The work of translation involves processes of assemblage: understanding something newly emergent in light of what is received, framing an idea from elsewhere in terms of what is known here, connecting theoretical frames and practices in new ways – all in light of an array of agendas related to making sense of the world, devising programs of action, asserting power and control, or just getting through the day (Kingfisher, 2013, p. 14)

Even in our small hypothetical office, the dynamics of persuasion, translation and assemblage are at work as individuals communicate with each other about their newfound lesson and co-constitute a more complex reality around it. Consequently, the lesson is on the move, and it is already changing in ways which preclude any suggestion of a clean and crisp form of transfer that moves a singular object from one clearly identified site to another ‘like some superior export product’ (Peck & Theodore, 2012, p. 23). This point is central to our purposes here because, by focusing almost exclusively on the generative moments of a lesson's creation, policy learning scholars have failed to understand that ‘policies often form themselves during the very course of travel … If policies are first disembedded so as to be rendered portable, once they set off on their travels they may be subject to further disarticulations, so that pieces of what has already been decontextualised are further abstracted for use in new settings’ (Kingfisher, 2013, p. 59). Consequently, we can claim that when it comes to understanding the nature of a learned-lesson, the factors that influence its dynamic capacity are just as important as those which created it in the first instance because those factors render it mutable.

To continue our example, perhaps our newly minted lesson persuades a supervisor and subsequently makes its way into a briefing paper that heads upwards and convinces that one crucial decision maker that action is required. Now our lesson has a champion and if action ensues, that lesson will need to leave the building and go out into the world. Out there it will need to convince others in different agencies about the need for action. From here, the possibilities are endless, and the effects of persuasion, translation and assemblage will grow exponentially when a lesson moves across space and time and a larger ensemble of actors enter the stage. A lesson might cross international borders and affect different communities around the world, it might go up to supranational entities or down to local governments and street-level actors and it might cross sectoral borders and leave the world of government by travelling into not-for profit or private sectors (Clarke et al., 2015; Kingfisher, 2013). Regardless of the locations, the key message is that as we move from our small office of analysts into the larger policy world, our lesson's journey must be ‘inescapably associated with policy mutation: if the form and effects of policies vary with context and shift while in transit, becoming embedded in both networks and within multiple “local” milieux, the “thing” that is being followed is evidently not itself an immutable object’ (Peck & Theodore, 2012, p. 24, emphasis added).

Of course, the opposite is also true, and perhaps more likely. It could very well be that our lesson lives, dies and is then forgotten in that small office of policy analysts, simply because it fails to persuade. Alternatively, the long litany of failures documented in the policy learning literature tells us that a lesson might begin a journey but never find an accommodating host willing to action it (Brown & Stark, 2022). Failures of this nature alert us to another important dimension of dynamic capacity, which is the need for a lesson to institutionalise into a policy context. Here the direction of travel is different. If a lesson is to have effects, it needs to stop moving across actors and travel downwards into the ideational and institutional matter of a policy area. Despite this change in direction, our three characteristics of travel – persuasion, translation and assemblage – will all remain as a lesson still needs to convince a host that it requires to be accommodated across a longer timeframe and all processes of institutionalisation involve complex discursive and ideational rearticulations (Schmidt, 2008). Change is therefore inevitable on this downward journey too as is complexity because those who receive lessons will often have significant levels of discretion when it comes to their institutionalisation (Mahoney & Thelen, 2012). However, without some form of institutionalisation, even a well-travelled lesson will quickly be forgotten due to the forces of institutional amnesia which are inherent within most policy systems (Stark & Head, 2019).

We need to be clear once again, however, that our ‘pitch’ about the value of dynamic capacity is not based upon claims of novelty as we are certainly not the first to think about the movement of policy knowledge. Indeed, much of our argument here, although framed towards specific policy learning scholarship, has a provenance in pre-existing concepts and perspectives that are broadly analogous. Most of this work spans across a well-worn distinction between ‘rational-instrumental’ and more ‘critical’ policy studies.

Situated at the more rational end of that distinction are studies of policy evaluation, lesson-drawing, policy transfer and diffusion. Forty-five years ago, for example, Carol Weiss (1978) mapped out the ‘circuitous and stony path’ (1978) that evaluation research had to take to find its policy audience (p. 64). Weiss's initial mapping led her to analyse how evaluation research gets translated across time and space because, if it is to have utility, policy research must move ‘from the abstract to the concrete … from the past (when the research was done) to the future (when it will be applied)’ (Weiss,. 1978, p. 61). This focus on the ‘channels through which evaluation travels’ (Weiss, 1999, p. 474) still has a profound influence on contemporary analyses about the utilisation of academic research within public policy today (for example, Van der Arend, 2014). Policy learning scholars will also be familiar with some classic works which relate to ‘lesson-drawing’ (Rose, 1991), ‘policy transfer’ (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000) and ‘policy diffusion’ (Shipan & Volden, 2012). Each of these concepts illustrates the movement of ideas across time and space and, like Weiss before them, they have prompted reflection about the barriers to travel that are created by a lack of cultural, institutional, and political proximity (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000, pp. 17–20; Rose, 1991, pp. 25–28; Shipan & Volden, 2012, p. 792).

On the other side of our distinction are a community of policy scholars, connected through their commitment to critical epistemologies, who problematise the literature noted directly above. The point of departure for these authors is the claim that the rational and positivist nature of transfer and diffusion literature simply does not reflect the complex reality of policy movement (Clarke et al., 2015, p. 19; Kingfisher, 2013, pp. 11–12; Peck, 2011, p. 791; Peck & Theodore, 2012, pp. 22–23), not least because it assumes a linear direction of travel in which ‘policy ideas or models are rendered as “objects” to be loaded up on a truck at point A and unloaded at point B’ (Clarke et al., 2015, p. 19). Thus, the case is made that translation and assemblage, rather than transfer and diffusion, provide a better conceptual lens for understanding policy movement and, moreover, that analyses of policy travel ought to proceed through a Latourian process of ‘tracing associations’ and finding ‘the social’ in the connections between things (like a learned-lesson) ‘that are not themselves social’ (Latour, 2005, p. 5). A final distinguishing feature of this literature which separates it from policy transfer studies is its focus on power. In this regard it is crucial to understand that new assemblages are ‘not just about meaning making but about meaning making in the interests of claims making … what is happening when policies move is a process of appropriation – a taking over as much as a carrying over’ (Kingfisher, 2013, p. 13).

This article occupies a space between these two poles. On the one hand, it sits comfortably within a body of policy learning research which recognises complexity, structural power and the co-constitutive nature of discursive meaning making (for example, Elliott & Macpherson, 2010; Freeman, 2007; Stark, 2018). However, the concern to speak directly to those who use the language of causality when thinking about policy learning theory (for example Dunlop & Radaelli, 2013, 2017) and the concern to generate practice orientated conclusions about the barriers and facilitators of lesson-learning, lends the analysis a ‘rational’ feel. Moreover, the travel focused upon here is much smaller in distance, much more specific and, arguably, less challenging analytically than those larger endeavours which have traced policy ideas across the globe and downwards and outwards to street-level bureaucrats, non-governmental agencies, and the recipients of policy (Clarke et al., 2015; Kingfisher, 2013). Here we are focused on a very specific and easy to observe form of lesson-learning (rather than policymaking) in a geographically limited policy community and, moreover, the findings predominantly speak to that smaller journey that connects the production of a recommendation to the starting point of its implementation.

Nevertheless, we argue that the concept of dynamic capacity can make a significant contribution to policy learning theory and practice by consolidating and building upon the work discussed above. More specifically, the concept offers value in three specific ways. First as a means of enhancing causal theories of policy learning, which have not properly identified the mechanisms that channel individual forms of ‘micro’ learning into collective forms of ‘meso’ (policy) learning. As it demands a more sustained and substantive analytical focus on the relational dimensions of learning, the concept of dynamic capacity can help us to identify the many factors that can propel and prohibit movement in a lesson-learning context. And if we can build up a more complete picture of lesson-learning travel across contexts, we will be able to generate fuller theoretical accounts of the process that moves lessons from the cognitive to the collective. Second, through the inclusion of the ‘downward’ institutionalising component, policy learning scholarship can engage with the concepts of institutional memory and amnesia, which represent significant factors in relation to the effectiveness of learned lessons (Stark & Head, 2019), and theories of institutionalisation more broadly (Mahoney & Thelen, 2012). Finally, and most importantly, dynamic capacity can be used as a concept that can wrench the focus away from the generative moments of policy learning and open up the study of a new set of variables that can have a bearing on the effectiveness of practice.

Methodology

Initially, the concept of dynamic capacity emerged through the consolidation of fragments of data that existed in previous research projects that were primarily concerned with the relationship between crises and policy learning. These projects hinted at the value that scholars and practitioners could gain from thinking about the future locations into which learned lessons had to travel (Stark, 2018; Stark, 2020; Brown & Stark, 2022). From these clues, we sketched the concept of dynamic capacity and theorised about its value to policy learning scholarship, but the existing data was partial and focused on different research objectives. A research project that was designed to map and explore lesson-learning in disaster management within the state of Queensland in Australia, however, offered an empirical opportunity to consider whether dynamic capacity was relevant to explaining specific lesson-learning processes and outcomes.

Disaster management is a policy area in which ideas, policies and actors are focused on lesson-learning. The ability to learn from a disaster event and to make policy reforms between events represents critical activities in terms of promoting public safety and enhancing resilience. Policy learning and disaster management therefore go hand in hand. Queensland represents the most disaster-prone state in Australia and consequently it has developed a robust set of legislative and policy orientated arrangements for dealing with disasters, which are regularly exercised in responses to floods, cyclones, bushfires and storm surges. It therefore represents an excellent policy space to explore lesson-learning.

Our research targeted a sample of disaster management interviewees as the primary means of data collection. Our sample had two features. First, each interviewee had responsibilities for lesson-learning within their organisation and, second, the sample spanned across all the relevant lesson-learning organisations within this community of practice. Consequently, 20 interviews were conducted with senior officials who operated across the disaster management arrangements. These included officials occupying strategic roles in the ‘blue light’ emergency services, senior officials in a variety of central policy departments and specific disaster management agencies, and disaster management officers located across the state's local governments. Of course, the small n of our sample prohibits generalisation, but this was not our goal. We simply wished to establish whether there were grounds for an argument that dynamic capacity ought to enter the lexicon of policy learning scholarship and receive further attention. This modest goal requires evidence of conceptual relevance rather than nomothetic conclusions.

We opted for a basic qualitative design using semi-structured interviews and created an inductive organising framework that was designed to generate data about lesson-learning generally rather dynamic capacity specifically. The objective was to generate a data set from extended conversations about policy learning which could then be analysed for evidence of dynamic capacity's relevance. This choice was made to avoid researcher bias and to ensure that data emerged without specific prompting. Interviewees were therefore asked a standardised set of broad questions about how they learned lessons within their organisation, whether and how they learned inter-organisationally, about the barriers they faced in relation to each, the successes or failures that they had experienced in terms of learning, and about the challenges of institutionalising lessons so that they were effective when the next disaster arrived. The data was then analysed for the existence of aspects that spoke to the concept of dynamic capacity as outlined above. This analysis was conducted through a two-fold process of inductive coding that was operationalised manually, followed by a thematic search via NVivo software, which was calibrated to search for themes relating to lesson-learning movement. What emerged was a series of themes that we turn to below.

Ethical approval was received from the University of Queensland’s LNR Committee on 12 May 2022 (HE000290).

Getting over travel fears

Before we begin to discuss the data, it is worth pausing to make two statements about what follows. The first is that we present the data as a series of ‘tips’ for lesson-learning practitioners. However, these forms of advice are embedded in thematic findings that are also designed for policy learning scholars. Second, and perhaps more controversially, we treat dynamic capacity as something positive that lesson-learners should pursue because without it lessons will be identified but never actioned. While we recognise that policy travel can lead to problematic outcomes (Kingfisher, 2013), in this specific context the primary challenge is to ensure that identified lessons produce outcomes that will exist when the next disaster arrives. With this in mind we can begin our traveller's guide.

Our first travel tip relates to the need to push back against perceptions of risk that can attach themselves to the practices of lesson sharing. This tip emerges from our interview data which revealed that lesson-learning actors are reluctant to send lessons out beyond their own organisational borders because of a belief that lessons about failures have the potential to invite criticism and blame. This risk aversion is a powerful disincentive which circumscribes dynamic capacity on two levels. First, within organisations there is a reluctance to be self-critical through the generation of lessons, especially when lesson-learners believe that political actors are waiting to consume their lessons. Second, fear of blame encourages organisations to internalise rather than share their lessons, which stymies inter-organisational learning. One local government official summarised both issues via an honest appraisal of the ways in which lessons that are generated through simulation exercises are shared with the Local Disaster Management Group (LDMG). The LDMG is a public committee compromising a variety of government and non-government stakeholders:

You are not always seeing the truth. Sometimes you might be pretending everything went well but it was actually completely chaotic. You are not going to say ‘yeah, everything went really bad and we performed really poorly’. You are going to say all the good things that happened … . That's why your own council learns more, because I would see every little thing and be able to say you need to change that, you need to change this, we need to do this better. … sometimes we can't even put the issues in the recommendations because it might be something within council that we are embarrassed to let the rest of the LDMG know. You don't want to say this went really wrong and it shouldn't have because it was our fault … you don't want to highlight that lesson in front of everyone. It may be fixed in the background but not documented. (DMO B, interview with author)

This was a repeated theme at the local government level where it was repeatedly emphasised that the public nature of the LDMGs meant that their knowledge was not shared:

There's some agencies that may not be comfortable sharing in that environment. … if something has gone badly or some people feel like its airing dirty laundry – because our LDMG has 40 odd agencies – when you add all that up people don't want the agency to look bad in front of others. … Its not about losing face, I think its simply that they’d rather be able to deal with it in house and be better for next time, but it doesn't help in terms of being able to share those lessons. (DMO D, interview with author)

This kind of risk aversion is familiar territory for those who study post-crisis learning. Crisis management scholars, for example, are well aware of the tension that exists between learning and blaming (Boin et al., 2008). Typically, however, this tension is discussed in terms of the way in which the politics of post-crisis accountability fora undermines the generation of effective lessons in the first instance. Policy learning scholars clearly need to acknowledge this tension but also understand that when it comes to dynamic capacity, effectively generated lessons might still not be shared if a belief exists that censure will follow. However, ultimately it is important to understand that what we are recording here are ostensible behaviours that are being shaped by the tacit exercise of power because at the core of this theme is a reluctance to produce new meanings (in the form of critical lessons) which challenge the status quo.

The good news is that policy practitioners in this network are very aware of the fear of blaming and often put in place specific measures to reduce it. Some, for example, foreground successes and things to be recognised as effective in their reports, while others have managed to incorporate ‘no failure’ language into their lesson-learning efforts. One member of the Queensland Police Service (QPS), for example, stressed how, ‘a nobody fails here’ mantra was essential when it comes to learning because, ‘people are frightened of it, they are frightened of being pointed out’ (QPS Official A, interview with author). This takes us to our first specific travel tip, which is that when it comes to making learned lessons move, ‘no-blame’ communications are essential. However, another means of getting over these fears also rests in the relational dimensions of policy learning itself, which is also a point highlighted in the interviews. The importance of building relationships locally and more broadly, and then generating trust through them, was cited as important in this regard because it was seen as a means of generating a sense of safety when it comes to sharing experiences. One local government disaster manager, for example, noted how, when an issue was voiced ‘a lot of my other colleagues across the state would say, oh we also encounter that, that's also an issue we have, and then I don't feel so alone. I feel like there is more solidarity’ (DMO F, interview with author). What we might say here, therefore, is that a second tip is that established lesson-learning relationships can take away the fear of travelling alone.

Knowing your destination

Often those who engage in policy learning assume that the identification of a lesson means that it will automatically be learned and institutionalised elsewhere. In other words, they assume that lessons speak for themselves in a persuasive manner. Of course, the long litany of examples in which identified lessons have found their way to shelves to gather dust tells us that this is not the case (see Stark, 2020). Despite this, those who generate lessons rarely think about how and where they need to travel. This is an issue as would-be implementers are often watching how lessons are produced and they will withdraw their support if they feel that lessons are being generated in ways which do not respect their context. This failure to consider implementing context during the generation of policy lessons constitutes a second barrier that limits dynamic capacity.

In our chosen policy community, this barrier was evident in the perceptions of local government disaster management officers who often cited a lack of sensitivity to their context as one reason why they ignored centrally formulated lessons. These actors are street-level bureaucrats who have neither the time nor the inclination to adopt centrally learned lessons that do not recognise their context. Thus:

Even with the best will in the world you can only review so much material … the state is so big and we all work in completely different ways in our own local government context and we’re all entirely different. Its very difficult to share collective knowledge that's useful and that can be implemented elsewhere. … We see many examples of lessons from Brisbane that don't mean much in North Queensland. (DMO C, interview with author)

This theme was a constant across interviews. Some street-level bureaucrats argued that central lesson-learners had to realise that not every lesson had to travel because ‘some lessons that might be learnt aren't multi-applicable. They’ll be unique to the environment and that's okay. That's a lesson in itself: we’ve actually understood that the environment is so unique that it needs a particular approach’ (DMO E, interview with the author). Others felt that lessons didn't make it from state to local government because no effort was made to reduce the costs of understanding lessons at the local level:

It would be good if, instead of just sending out these reports which are pretty lengthy and don't always have the context which makes it hard to apply to your area, it would be much better if they delivered some presentations from the people actually involved, you know, saying this is what happened, this is what we learned, rather than simply sending us a report that says here are the recommendations. (DMO A, interview with author)

What these views mean is that centrally formulated lessons will struggle to have dynamic capacity. However, if those who generate lessons can think more about these destinations and then reflect upon how they might future proof lessons against such negativity, they may have a better chance of travelling. This points to a bigger issue with learning generally, which is that much more needs to be done to think prospectively about the steps, stages and functions of learning that exist beyond the publication of a lesson (Stark & Yates, 2021).

A range of travel tips might be offered here. One would be that lessons ought to be generated in a co-constitutive manner so that implementers are assured that they are sensitive to their context. A second is that there is value in thinking about outcome orientated recommendations, rather than more specific processes and goals, in situations in which networks of differentiated actors are required for implementation. And a third travel tip would certainly be that knowledge of a destination can be used to create forms of communication that are different from the typical report and recommendation format and therefore more capable of persuading implementing actors about the need for action. There are pros and cons to all these suggestions, however they do not detract from a more substantive travel tip, which is that lessons need to be generated and communicated with cognisance of future implementation contexts.

The importance of translation

As was discussed above, when lessons move across multiple policy audiences, they are translated and reinterpreted. The existence of translation as a dynamic and the quality of specific translation efforts can therefore be seen as a facilitator or a barrier when it comes to dynamic capacity. In this policy community, the need for translation within and across organisations was widely recognised by interviewees and numerous examples of success were offered in this regard. Two themes characterised this data. The first tells us that these actors work hard to translate knowledge so that it can move upwards within their own organisations and (hopefully) find approval at the highest levels. In local government, this typically meant translations that might attract support from elected politicians either through the language of risk management or via ‘the business case’ for funding. In the central departments, translations occurred as a means of convincing the minister's office or executive management teams of the validity of a lesson. The second theme tell us that a great deal of work goes into translating policy language into operational language that can then be understood on the front-line of disaster planning and response. These themes were strongly emphasised in the emergency services. One QFES interviewee, for example, explained that:

All the information for us at the end of the day is about what we learn from this and how we can change activity or address a reporting activity to drive all those things up through the chain … Once it gets up to more of a senior leadership management level, we actually assimilate that information and try and transcribe it into our operational purpose. Whether or not that influences our policy, our practices or our budget comes out of that. (QFES Official B, interview with author)

However, it is certainly not the case that these efforts at translation have created a community in which a common language exists across organisations. It was often noted, for example, that the lessons that emerge from the emergency services are too technical to be understood by other agencies. Conversely, in those emergency services officials often lamented the public managerial (or even in their eyes political) tenor of the lessons that came out of the state level departments and agencies. Elsewhere specific examples of inter-organisational confusion were discussed in terms of differences around terminology. These related to, for example, the language used to describe the probabilities attached to potential disaster events, which often causes confusion, and a lack of inter-subjective meaning about the nature and purpose of certain policy instruments (such as concept of operations documents). Another strand of evidence here came from local government, and it suggests that the process of implementation itself often changes the intent of a recommendation via translations that turn an outcome focus into a technical exercise. One local official who had previously worked at the state level illustrated this issue:

The thing that used to frustrate me, particularly on reviews, was that to get the review recommendations implemented, they’d essentially take the recommendations from the publication, put them into a spreadsheet, divide out the tasks and people would beetle away. Unfortunately, people would deliver on recommendations without necessarily reading the context but somewhere along the line they would give you a thumbs up that the recommendation had been implemented. So quite often you would get a lot of things done but you have actually missed the holistic effect. (DMO H, interview with author)

In this form of translation, a check list mentality to learning leads to a form of superficial implementation in which process supersedes outcome. The result of this translation, as the interviewee stresses, is an ability to report success in the absence of meaningful change.

This data very much reflects the pre-existing claims of translation and assemblage scholars. On the one hand we see actors trying to get lessons moving through efforts which, to use Freeman’s (2009) words, represent attempts to reconcile the different meanings held in different policy worlds (p. 431). However, as a whole what we see is a gestalt of meanings and meaning making efforts that are complimenting and colliding through an assemblage in which some translating actors are trying to reconcile meanings, some are struggling to find shared meanings, and others are translating in order to serve a variety of interests that are not about lesson-learning.

Despite this complexity, the data connected to translation was also replete with tips about how to recommunicate lessons across organisations in ways that might reconcile meanings. Number one in this regard is, in the words of one interviewee, ‘simplification every time’ because simplifying language allows those who are receiving lessons to ‘self-identify’ with them on their own terms (QPS Official B, interview with author). A second strand of data is even more practical as it relates to the medium of translation. In this regard, the typical report as a means of learning was regularly criticised as a one-dimensional medium. When asked what might work more effectively, many lesson-learners suggested workshops, which would allow direct access to report authors and the chance to collaborate with fellow implementers, or first-hand testimonials, preferably generated via multi-media, from those involved in the events themselves. On both counts, the common refrain remained that when it comes to translating recommendations, it's always about ‘understanding the intent of it. Rather than just being given some words on a page, understanding what the intent is. … I don't think it should ever be dictated how because one size doesn't fit all. You’ve got to be able to understand intent and apply it to how you work locally’ (DMO A, interview with author). Connecting all these views is an implicit position that translation persuades when it offers the listener agency and autonomy. We can bring these points together into a fourth travel tip, which is that the translation of policy lessons requires interactive forms of communication, which are simple, outcome focused, and promote agency.

Finding good accommodation

Having discussed some of the issues from the side of those who wish lessons to travel, we can now think about the barriers that are created by hosts. One major issue in this regard is finding ‘accommodation’, which in our case means finding an agency or actor who is willing to accept responsibility for the implementation of a lesson that has been generated elsewhere. This is not as easy as it might seem because at this end of the journey hosts can have complete discretion when it comes to accepting or rejecting lessons. At the state level, for example, one experienced lesson learner emphasised the challenge in this regard in relation to crisis resolution strategies. In doing so they underscored the importance of persuasion:

Actual lesson learning, you are actually presenting a complex problem to people who often see it as discretionary effort. If this was made easier, we would get more out of it and get more acceptance. … a lot of the time we do resolution strategies, the people who have the ability to sort this are often not apportioned that responsibility and held to account, and that's where we fail because it's a whole of government response. Trying to persuade people to come to the party is the hardest part now. (QPS Official A, interview with author, emphasis added)

A range of reasons were also offered as to why implementers use their agency to reject lessons. Amongst the ‘blue light’ responders, views existed which suggested that their hierarchical nature meant that certain activities that are required to action lessons, such as training and exercises, often lacked ownership because they existed ‘between the lines’. Others simply suggested that conversations about the ownership of certain risks had not taken place and this meant there was a ‘blurring of the lines’ that allowed lessons to go unheeded (QFES Official B, interview with author). A final theme, which was prevalent at the local government level, illustrates how would-be learners ‘turn away’ from implementation because the lessons they are being invited to action are impossible to achieve or at best very difficult. Officials often communicated this via the metaphor of the ‘too hard basket’. A good example comes from a local government official responsible for cyclone shelters in Queensland. The need to upgrade these shelters, particularly those in schools in her region, was a lesson that emerged after a massive Category Five Cyclone event in 2011 (Cyclone Yasi). However, that lesson remains immobile because ‘when we have complex issues across multiple agencies and levels of government it can be difficult to identify who owns the task and have success in driving it, and therefore the task just sits there unresolved’ (DMO J, interview with author).

Another barrier preventing lessons from being dynamic relates to the capacity of a host to accommodate a lesson that they know is relevant and useful. This data was regularly communicated using a specific narrative, which distinguished between ‘lessons identified’ and ‘lessons learned’ and stressed that the latter term should only be used if implementation and behavioural change had ensued. To use our travel metaphor, we might say that this data shows how lessons had managed to move inter-organisationally and found hosts who were willing, but unable, to properly accommodate them. Different interviewees offered different reasons for this lack of capacity but central to them all was a view that it meant that the same lessons repeatedly appeared across time because they had not been addressed. In local government, for example, there was a perception that disaster management was not a priority. The clearest consequence of this was a lack of human resources and, as a result, an inability to properly implement lessons because:

Disaster management is often marginalised in local government … We are not roads, rates or rubbish so often not considered core business. I often joke that we get wheeled out to perform when some kind of disaster happens and then we are shoved back in the broom cupboard until the next time. Its never a priority until it's a priority which is often too late and keeping momentum after an event is a real challenge. … we are trying to make a change, to increase understanding that we are core business, we are legislative and are required. Unfortunately not every Council has staff that focus on disaster management … [and] there is much for local governments to do. (DMO A, interview with author)

While the quote above shows the challenges of maintaining lesson-learning momentum, a similar one below tells us that a lack of capacity leads to certain lessons being accommodated while others neglected. Once again, the issue for street-level lesson-learners is that when it comes to disaster management:

In my experience few stakeholders seem to be that interested in the action plan as a whole and no one is waving a stick at you to ensure all the issues are addressed … we’ve got all these actions to get fixed, then some of them don't get fixed. Then they just go on into the next year … [and] what happens is generally you focus on the one lesson that has been bad that year. So, the next year we focus on that. You might focus on it still the next year. But then all these other lessons from three or four years ago you’ve forgotten about. Then they start going wrong again. (DMO B, interview with author)

It is important to understand that it is not just those lessons that move inter-organisationally that struggle with accommodation. It is also the case that lessons are regularly identified within organisations but, once again, capacity problems ensure that they are not delivered:

We can focus on recommendations and try and improve them. That's probably a space that I haven't quite figured out … What I have been finding is that a lot of the recommendations obviously are repeating themselves, which, you know, is an indication to me that we haven't properly learnt from it … you capture all this great information from your debriefs and that process is working really, really well. I think the next step, which is actually looking at the recommendations and them implementing them, is what I am finding challenging. (DMO G, interview with author)

What we see in these views is an example of what has been labelled ‘reluctant inaction’ (McConnell & ‘t Hart, 2019, p. 650). In the policy sciences, there is a tendency to exaggerate the explanatory power of agenda management theory as a means of understanding why officials do nothing in the face of pressures to act. However, as Brown and Stark (2022) illustrate, the concept of ‘policy inaction’ is useful as it reminds us ‘that inaction is just as likely to emerge from more typical issues that bedevil the daily grind of policymaking: policymakers have blind spots, officials often lack political support for solutions, the policy tools required to do the job may not exist, and all actors are wrapped in cognitive and structural straightjackets’ (p. 48). This is precisely what we see in relation to this policy community. Inaction is often ‘reluctant’ in the sense that officials want to act because they recognise the importance of the lessons that have travelled to them, but they simply cannot accommodate them because of a lack of capacity. This points to the value of thinking about lesson-learning and policy travel in relation to the literature on policy capacity (see Painter & Pierre, 2010 for an overview)2011. This is a potentially important connection given that the capacity literature already discusses how it influences the generation of knowledge in the first instance (Howlett & Wellstead, 2011) organisational learning within government specifically (Dunlop, 2015) and the effectiveness of public administration broadly (Peters, 2015). This literature tells us that out of all the barriers identified, this one is perhaps the most insurmountable. In an environment of resource scarcity, disaster managers typically lose out as they deal with irregular events which do not have strong and ever-present constituencies of interest (Stark & Taylor, 2014). What we cannot offer here therefore is a magic bullet in the form of a tip that will allow policy learners to attract more resources. Nevertheless, what we can say is that lessons would be better able to find good accommodation if they were formulated with a greater understanding of the capacities that do (and do not) exist amongst implementers.

The long-term stay

Thus far we have been considering the capacity of lessons to move across space and time. This is reflected in the use (and abuse) of travel metaphors that have sought to emphasise the need for lessons to keep moving, to keep changing, and to keep persuading until they find acknowledgement. However, once that support has been found and implementing action ensues, we ought to think differently. Now the lesson needs to stop moving, put down anchor, and settle in for the long durée. The direction of travel here is downwards as the lesson needs to be absorbed and institutionalised into a policy space in way that will ensure its survival.

In the case of disaster management, the need to institutionalise lessons is particularly important because the only certainty that officials have, especially in a state like Queensland, is that another disaster will arrive imminently. The challenge therefore is to ensure that lessons remain alive when ‘the next one’ appears. However, discussions about institutionalisation revealed a very strong theme, which sits alongside fear of blaming, as the largest barrier to dynamic capacity in this community. This relates to the issue of ‘churn’ – registered in terms of staff turnover and organisational change – which was repeatedly defined as the problem for these agencies when it came to institutionalising lessons. Brevity does not permit a full account of the large volume of commentary on this issue, but it can be summarised first in terms of staff turnover, compounded by issues in relation to knowledge management, that means the same lessons are called for across time:

In the time I have been here I keep hearing the same things repeatedly, not just in the disaster space but in other areas where lessons should have been learned and maybe they were and were documented but its five years ago and unless you’ve got that corporate knowledge and historical knowledge of what happened in the past or know where to find it if you weren't the person with that knowledge. That comes down to experience as well not just documentation. What's written is not necessarily reflective of actual experience. (DMO C, interview with author)

Organisational restructuring is also an issue in this community. While the disaster management arrangements have been relatively settled since their enactment through legislation in 2003, the individual agencies who action those measures are far from immune from organisational churn. For example, one official from a state government department, when asked about barriers to learning, suggested that:

One of the biggest, in terms of corporate memory and retaining knowledge, was when a number of years ago we underwent a dramatic restructure … the amount of corporate knowledge or the depth of corporate knowledge that went as a result of that restructure. I don't know how you quantify that but its almost like corporate amnesia … you would like to think that what we learn the first time around we are going to apply the second time around? (State Official A, interview with author)

These perceptions support studies of ‘institutional amnesia’, which have already stressed that high levels of turnover and restructuring can be an issue for policymaking generally (Pollitt, 2009) and for policy learning specifically (Stark & Head, 2019) because they rob policy systems of memory. Thus, the factors that create institutional amnesia are our final set of variables that affect dynamic capacity. Rather than influencing the ability of a lesson to travel, they influence its ability to settle and to grow in ways which ensure its value to the future. Once again, however, the actors in this policy community are aware of this issue and have attempted to respond to it. Responses come in the form of the codification of lessons into disaster management plans, staff training that uses ‘the stories’ of past events and the use of regular exercises as a means of keeping disaster lessons present within organisational agendas. These practical responses take us to our final tip in this traveller's guide, which is that long-term institutionalisation requires lessons to be embedded through formal encoding and cultural remembering.

Conclusion

In this conclusion we return to our three objectives. Our first concluding point therefore takes us back to the argument that dynamic capacity can enhance causal theories of policy learning. Typically, those theories tell us that cognitive change in an individual (micro learning) prompts collective learning in an organisation (meso learning), which may then influence learning ‘out there’ (social learning) beyond the borders of government (see, for example, Dunlop & Radaelli, 2017, p. 314). But what are the intervening variables that connect these different aspects of learning together? This is where policy learning scholarship currently remains speculative, and where we see a role for dynamic capacity. Our analysis has certainly given us an insight into the connections between individual learning at the micro-level and (inter)organisational learning at the meso-level. Clearly, the first and most obvious answer to the question posed above is that ‘hard’ institutional processes matter as they represent the channels through which learned lessons can move. In this policy community, a series of institutional arrangements have been well developed over time in ways which connect the key actors together and allow for the movement of learned lessons. Without these institutional avenues, lessons would have nowhere to go once they cross the borders of the organisation that formulated them. This once again shows the indispensable nature of capacity to lesson-learning. However, inter-organisational meaning making that persuades, translates and (re)assembles lessons represents the real medium that converts individual learning into collective learning within these institutional avenues. Thus, these avenues merely serve as the medium through which complex assemblages form and shift. Moreover, the complexity of these assemblages invites us to reject notions of linearity and transmission when it comes to lesson-learning movement and, perhaps more importantly, demands that we broaden the analytical focus of learning scholarship away from the creation of a lesson so that we might better recognise that lesson-learning is ‘always in the making, and always about unfolding and shifting struggle’ (Kingfisher, 2013, p. 16).

What our data also shows is that a series of factors influence the sharing of lessons and their impact on practice. These are the variables that influence dynamic capacity in this case and they invite us to think about whether they might represent dynamics that connect (or disconnect) the micro and meso levels of policy learning together more generally. They include the extent to which: (1) learning is associated with blaming and risk; (2) lessons are generated with cognisance of the implementers required to action them; (3) translation efforts that reconcile meanings are recognised as important by those who wish lessons to be implemented; (4) learning effectiveness is associated with implementation capacity, and; (5) effort is made to counteract the institutional amnesia caused by public sector ‘churn’. The identification of these factors will certainly help policy learning scholars think more comprehensively about their causal theories, but they also point the way to more effectiveness in the real world of policy learning. This takes us to our second concluding point, which is the reiteration of our argument that when it comes to policy learning effectiveness, the most important variables are those that allow lessons to have dynamic capacity.

We wish to end our journey, however, with a comment about what all of this means for practice. To some extent, an appreciation of dynamic capacity has already filtered into crisis management policy through the language of ‘lesson management’ in which it is recognised that there is more to learning than the identification and drafting of a recommendation (see, for example, Inspector General Emergency Management [IGEM], 2020). However, while these prescriptions might recognise that the identification of a lesson is merely the start of a journey towards effectiveness, and that auditing implementation and promoting memory are important, they do not go far enough. To properly improve policy learning we ought to recast it as a relational exercise in persuasion that is aimed at convincing others, who have no obligation to act, that lessons are important and that different meanings can be reconciled. It is certainly true that at the moment learned lessons do not speak for themselves, but if we understand and adopt the practices that promote dynamic capacity, they won't have to: good policy work will do the talking for them.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Alastair Stark

Alastair Stark is an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland. Alastair is a public policy scholar who specialises in the study of crises and disasters. His current policy research examines the role that institutional amnesia plays in the policy process and his crisis management research is focused upon the nature and effectiveness of post-crisis lesson-learning.

Jenny van der Arend

Jenny van der Arend is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Queensland. Jenny is a public policy scholar who focuses on the barriers and facilitators that connect (and disconnect) academic and policy worlds.