The lessons of failure: learning and blame avoidance in public policy-making

By Michael Howlett. 2012

288 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f1da8423f1be7c919ccdf3790ef5defa40d0073

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Michael Howlett
2. M. Scipioni
3. Ishan Mukherjee
4. J. J. Woo
5. M. Ramesh
6. Allan McConnell
7. Xun Wu
8. Mark Bovens

In Public Administration

1. M. Scipioni
2. Ishan Mukherjee
3. Michael Howlett
4. J. J. Woo
5. Allan McConnell
6. Mark Bovens
7. Paul ‘t Hart
8. N. Cohen

Citations in the corpus

• Why are policy innovations rare and so often negative? Blame avoidance and problem denial in climate change policy-making (2014, unknown): “Using such a definition, for many analyses of the climate change area such as those cited above, a failure is considered to have occurred simply because a stated policy initiative did not correct or resolve a policy problem, that is, in purely programmatic terms (Howlett, 2012).”
• What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze (2015, background): “Unless we can find a way of navigating the maze of what constitutes policy failure, we risk repeating the mistakes of the past, both in terms of producing policy failures and learning from failure (Howlett, 2012).”
• Understanding the persistence of policy failures: The role of politics, governance and uncertainty (2015, background): “…introduce bills they fully expect to fail in order to embarrass a government – rather than unintentional or “accidental” ones, whereby an otherwise well-intentioned effort to promote improved childcare, for example, may be de-railed by fraudulent misappropriation of funds (Howlett, 2012).”
• Policy Design and Non-Design: Towards a Spectrum of Policy Formulation Types (2014, background): “Many noble efforts of policy formulators have failed due to poor design capacity or the inability or lack of desire on the part of decision-makers to alter elements of existing policies or create new ones in a logical, instrumental, fashion (Cohn, 2004; Howlett, 2012).”
• Failing forward in EU migration policy? EU integration after the 2015 asylum and migration crisis (2018, methodology): “Borrowing from past studies on policy failures, both cases seem to be instance of ‘major failures’ (Howlett 2012: 544), namely policy failures featuring high salience (in terms of intensity and visibility), and large magnitude (in terms of extent and duration).”
• From tools to toolkits in policy design studies: The new design orientation towards policy formulation research (2015, background): “Historically the efforts of policy makers often have failed due to poor designs which have failed adequately to incorporate this complexity into policy formulation (Howlett, 2012; Cohn, 2004).”
• Revisiting the study of policy failures (2016, background): “…(as opposed to political) learning from highly public, politically charged forms of feedback such as that produced by evaluators and public inquiries in the context of policy fiascos is proving even more difficult (Birkland 2006; Boin et al. 2008; Hansén 2007; Howlett 2012; May 1992; Walsh 2006).”