Abstract
What depth of learning can policy appraisal stimulate? How we can account for the survival policies that are known to pose significant countervailing risks? While heralded as a panacea to the inherent ambiguity of the political world, the proposition pursued is that policy appraisal processes intended to help decision-makers learn may actually be counterproductive. Rather than simulating policy-oriented learning, appraisals may reduce policy actors’ capacity to think clearly about the policy at hand. By encouraging a variety of epistemic inputs from a plurality of sources and shoehorning knowledge development into a specified timeframe, policy appraisal may leave decision-makers overloaded with conflicting information and evidence which dates rapidly. In such circumstances, they to fall back on institutionalised ways of thinking even when confronted with evidence of significant mismatches between policy objectives and the consequences of the planned course of action. Here learning is ‘single-loop’ rather than ‘double-loop’—focussed on adjustments in policy strategy rather than re-thinking the underlying policy goals. Using insights into new institutional economics, the paper explores how the results of policy appraisals in technically complex issues are mediated by institutionalised ‘rules of the game’ which feed back positively around initial policy frames and early interpretations of what constitutes policy success. Empirical evidence from UK biofuels policy appraisal confirms the usefulness of accounts that attend to the temporal tensions that exist between policy and knowledge development. Adopting an institutional approach that emphasises path dependence does not however preclude the possibility that the depth of decision-makers’ learning might change. Rather, the biofuels case suggests that moves towards deeper learning may be affected by reviews of appraisal evidence led by actors beyond immediate organizational context with Chief Scientific Advisers within government emerging as potentially powerful catalysts in this acquisition of learning capabilities.
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Notes
Semi-structured interviews have been conducted with civil servants—in the Department for Transport (DfT) and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)—government scientific advisers, industry officials, politicians and environmentalists. This evidence was bolstered by written and oral evidence given by 56 decision-makers and stakeholders involved in the RTFO to the Environmental Audit Committee in October and November 2007 (EAC 2008).
The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation Order 2007, No. 3072, October 25th.
Perhaps most notable were the concerns raised among government Ministers when the paper by Searchinger et al. (2008) was published in Science in February 2008 argued that US biofuels production caused land-use change leading to increased net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
I am grateful to one of my referees for stressing these points.
On environmentalists’ support for biofuels see the 2004 letter to The Guardian (Thompson et al. 2004) and the June 2005 ‘Bioethanol Declaration’.
First generation biofuels are made from feedstocks, whose sugars, starch and oils are easily extractable. Second generations involve a different bioconversion process, where all forms of biomass can be used. Such processes help avoid the fuel versus food dilemma of the first. Third generation fuels, which are the subject of research and development, focus on the source of biofuels where the aim is to exploit specially engineered energy crops. Finally, the promise of the fourth generation is that production systems can be engineered in which crops capture carbon from the atmosphere before converting this into fuel (Biopact 2007; Harvey 2009).
This has been superseded by the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive (CEU 2008).
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Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the PSA annual conference in Manchester, UK, 7–9 April, 2009 (panel 6.1), the ECPR joint sessions in Lisbon, 14–19 April 2009 (workshop 30 on ‘The Politics of Policy Appraisal) and ‘Decarbonising the car?’ workshop at the LSE, 8 July 2009. Particular thanks are extended to Neil Carter, Leon Hermans, Michael Howlett, Klaus Jacob, Oliver James, Markku Lehtonen, Allan McConnell, Tim Rayner, Duncan Russel, Fritz Sager, Gerry Stoker, John Turnpenny and three anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions and constructive criticisms. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Dunlop, C.A. The temporal dimension of knowledge and the limits of policy appraisal: biofuels policy in the UK. Policy Sci 43, 343–363 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-009-9101-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-009-9101-7