Policy transfer as learning – capturing variation in what decision-makers learn from epistemic communities
Dunlop, Claire A.
Date: 1 June 2009
Journal
Policy Studies
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Publisher DOI
Related links
Abstract
Almost two decades ago, Peter M. Haas formulated the epistemic community
framework as a method for investigating the influence of knowledge-based experts in international policy transfer. Specifically, the approach was designed to address decision-making instances characterized by technical complexity and uncertainty. Control over the ...
Almost two decades ago, Peter M. Haas formulated the epistemic community
framework as a method for investigating the influence of knowledge-based experts in international policy transfer. Specifically, the approach was designed to address decision-making instances characterized by technical complexity and uncertainty. Control over the production of knowledge and information enables epistemic communities to articulate cause and effect relationships and so frame issues for collective debate and export their policy projects globally. Remarkably, however, we still know very little about the variety of ways in which decisionmakers actually learn from epistemic communities. This article argues that variety
is best captured by differentiating the control enjoyed by decision-makers and
epistemic communities over the production of substantive knowledge (or means) that informs policy from the policy objectives (or ends) to which that knowledge is
directed. The implications of this distinction for the types of epistemic community decision-maker learning exchanges that prevail are elaborated using a typology of adult learning from the education literature which delineates four possible
learning situations. This typology is then applied to a comparative study of US
and EU decision-makers’ interaction with the epistemic community that formed around the regulation of the biotech milk yield enhancer bovine somatotrophin (rbST) to illustrate how the learning types identified in the model play out in practice.
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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