| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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results from experience.”33 In essence, policymaking participants learn lessons from past successes and failures. Over time, policymakers build up a repertoire of workable policy techniques that can be matched to new situations as circumstances dictate. Intellectually speaking, policymakers prefer to stick to the familiar, employing proven techniques whenever they are easily applied to new problems. However, when new problems are ambiguous, or when policy failure demonstrates that favored techniques are unworkable, a window of opportunity opens for greater innovation. At these moments, policy “middlemen” spanning the boundary between state and society have the opportunity to advocate new policy formulations. These political actors, however, bear a heavy intellectual burden and must employ a combination of expert knowledge and argumentation in order to build support for favored initiatives.
In advancing the political learning thesis, Heclo opened a new theoretical avenue for scholars interested in exploring the intellectual dimensions of policy change. However, Heclo also left many theoretical questions unanswered, leaving future researchers to debate the scope and nature of learning within the policy process. In particular, scholarship is divided on the question of who learns—that is, which actors or institutions within the policymaking process are the vehicles for learning? Studies of US foreign policy and British macroeconomic policy suggest that state leaders and their closest advisors are the primary vehicles for learning.34 These findings contrast with those of Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, who argued that learning is a discursive process involving a broad range of state and societal actors within specific policy domains.35 Still other scholars have argued that governmental bodies may engage in “organizational learning” by incorporating new experiences and knowledge into their organizational memories.36