From Decision Makink to Policy Learning

The complexity of the environment of economic and political decision-making processes has grown with the fall of the Post-World War II order in the 1980s and 1990s. Decision-makers during all times and ages have faced situations in which they had to take decisions before the background of incomplete information situations. What has changed with the rise of globalisation phenomena such as the information technology revolution, the shortening production-cycles and the increasing international economic competition of the 1970s and 1980s is that decision- makers now have to select relevant and necessary information in a situation of information-overflow and make their decisions in reactions to often quickly changing circumstances. Policy learning (or more correctly "learning based policy development") can be seen as the attempts of policy- makers and institutions to cope with the rising complexity of their globalising environments. Under the term "policy learning" we understand the deliberate and systematic effort of policy makers to analyse and evaluate past policies of their own as well as of other actors on national and international levels. The goal of such a process then is to devise new policies, which are (better) suited to solve the problems they have been devised for. Research into policy learning is paramount if decision-making procedures are to be better understood and to be refined for future use. This research project aims at analysing policy learning and the way policy learning has changed over the last decades. The roles of national actors and international regimes such as the EU are considered as well as the function of new instruments supporting policy learning, such as evaluation and benchmarking exercises, (technology) monitoring and assessment, Delphi studies, and the like. An important question in this respect is if these new instruments have produced more "objective", transparent and systematic results. The research is to be carried out in three phases, the first of which encompasses an analysis and comparison of current concepts of policy learning. Then, three case studies in the fields of technology policy, higher education policy, biotechnology policy and regulation shall be analysed so as to see how policy learning has occurred, how it has changed and what the role of international organisations and of new instruments supporting policy learning has been in the process. Finally, a comparative analysis of the three case studies is to take place, followed by a dissemination phase.

Policy learning happens more often than even political decision makers would be led to believe. A research project at Institute of Advances Studies (IHS) analysed these learning processes. It showed that learning in politics and administration have been subject to internationalisation over the last decade, for which the Austrian EU accession played a major role. Decision makers learned from other policy fields, other countries and international organisations, such as the OECD and the EU. In several cases national experts were important for the transfer of new knowledge. Policy learning was particularly prevalent in cases of increasing problem complexity against the backdrop of globalisation processes. Learning cannot only be found in technocratic policy fields such as research and technological development policies, but also in areas characterised by profound value conflicts such as the regulation of abortion. Cases were drawn from the policy fields of research and technology policy, politics of life (abortion regulation) and higher education policies. The main research questions were, whether policy learning can be detected, if it has changed over the last 35 years, whether content and type of policies make a difference for policy learning, what the role of international organisations in policy learning is and if new instruments of policy learning (e.g. evaluation, technology foresight and benchmarking studies) make a difference for policy learning. An interdisciplinary team consisting of the political scientist Peter Biegelbauer (project leader), the social anthropologist Bernhard Hadolt and the sociologists Erich Grießler, Lorenz Lassnigg and Kurt Mayer carried out the research. First research results are available as working papers on the homepage of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Department for Sociology (http://www.ihs.ac.at).