Speaker
Description
The question of how policy learning affects the localization of globally circulating policies has been central to our understanding of urban policy mobility. Within the policy mobilities literature, scholars from various disciplines, ranging from anthropology to geography and sociology to urban planning, have captured the interconnected urban processes and outcomes of global policy circulation, wherein policy actors learn and move policy ideas from place to place through global networks of policy communities.
Yet, this understanding of policy learning in urban policy mobility only limitedly describes the policymaking behaviors and learning activities of policy elites that primarily occur in the earliest moments of its overall experience. In practice, their localization in the actual policymaking context will feature more complex adaptive dynamics and interactions, in which various learned lessons and their (uneven) deliberation flow constantly between its constitutive stages. It entails multiple forms of knowledge exchange between a diverse range of policy actors from different governance levels with varying capacities to influence specific components of the whole policy cycle. Together, they will have a special consequence for the localized process and outcome of urban policy mobility.
In these reflections, this article explores diverse patterns of policy learning and their implications for policy outcome as an international ‘best practice’ not only travels to and arrives in a city, but also lives through multiple interrelated stages of its life cycle. The purpose is to highlight how multiple types of learned lessons, drawn from diverse sources of knowledge, become (differently) enmeshed, streamlined and articulated into the local formulation and implementation of a traveling policy practice, extending beyond the initial encounters of policy elites with its simplified narrative of success. It argues that the way in which the specific capacities of policy actors intersect with prevailing contextual circumstances at the local level will have a significant influence on the translation of learned lessons into concrete substances for policy outcome.
The case of participatory budgeting for climate change adaptation (Wiener Klimateam) from Vienna, Austria, adds an empirical dimension to this theoretical approach. The empirical findings presented zoom the relationship between policy learning and policy outcome in Wiener Klimateam into five separate – yet interrelated – stages of its overall budgeting cycle (issue-framing; instrument selection; participatory process; output implementation; and evaluation) vis-à-vis the actors, sources, types and effects of policy learning. By doing so, the discussion of these findings connects the recent theoretical advances in the literature on policy learning within the broader policy sciences with the remaining issues and gaps in extant research on urban policy mobility.
| Keywords | citizen participation; participatory budgeting; policy learning; policy mobility; urban policy |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
