Post-recession UK road policy change: The role of individual and collective learning

What role does the individual and collective cognition of policymakers play in the relation between economic crises and policy change? Post-recession road building plans in the United Kingdom (1988-2011) are a particularly illuminating case to demonstrate the complex and volatile nature of the causal interdependencies between crisis, individual learning, collective learning, and policy change within a particular collective setting. In this Chapter, we analyse the statements of all policymakers who participated to the meetings of the Commons Transport Committee (CTSC) – a crucial collective structure in the policymaking process of this sector. We interpret them according to a set of theoretical expectations about the relation between crises, policy learning and policy change. The case study showed that changes in the dominant paradigms did occur over time, within the CTSC. In addition, paradigm changes were clearly connected to policy changes: during each period of time, policy decisions were undoubtedly inspired by the dominant paradigm among the members of the CTSC. Our analysis suggests that paradigm changes resulted from individual and collective learning. At the collective level, during each period of time, there was a fair amount of policymakers supporting different policy paradigms who participated to the same meetings (ties), which suggests that those policymakers had many opportunities to acquire, translate and disseminate information that challenged their pre-existing beliefs (collective learning). This being said, the high number of “within-paradigm” ties also suggests some form of learning through the reinforcement of existing beliefs. Overall, the intensity of debates (“within-paradigm” and “between-paradigms” ties) is high, within the CTSC. This suggests that collective structures enhancing the quantity and quality of debates are conducive to policy learning. At the individual level, the analysis of policymakers who participated to CTSC sessions during more than one period of time suggests that some learning also occurred. However, many policymakers did not change their beliefs. Despite this, there is a collective dynamic resulting from rules, routines and other CTSC structural aspects that elicits paradigm changes whereas many individual policymakers do still not support those changes. Hence, consistent with theory, collective and individual learning are connected but different processes: collective learning is more than the simple sum of individual learning processes. Overall, this study adds evidence to policy process theories’ contention that the effects of external shocks, as drivers of policy change, strongly depend on policymakers’ reactions to those shocks as well as the effect of collective structures on learning processes.