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

Recent studies by Hood have underscored the significance of the desire of decision-makers to avoid blame for poor policy initiatives, highlighting the importance to policy-making of learning about how best to avoid policy failure. This article examines several different concepts of policy failure in the literature on the subject, such as policy accidents, errors, mistakes, and anomalies, along with recent work by McConnell and his colleagues on the general types and sources of such failures. The article distinguishes between ‘thin’ (technical-strategic) and ‘thick’ (political-experiential) policy learning and links them to McConnell’s three categories of political, programme, and process failures. The analysis points to the significant and underappreciated roles played by process and political problems in the analysis of policy failure and the need to draw lessons in these areas as well as in more technically oriented programme-related ones if the prospects of policy success are to be enhanced.