Introduction

As Chapter 1 highlights, the literature on policy failure is growing (Dunlop, 2017). A good deal of attention has been focused on defining what we mean by failure. The most complete and best-used typology comes from McConnell who identifies three main types – process, programme and political (McConnell, 2010). The failure to link policy ideas to reality is either a failure of: process – the management of the policy-making process (for example, examination of policy options, managing experts and stakeholders and commanding legitimacy); programme – the technical design and implementation of the policy; or, politics – the distortion of policy ideas for partisan or electoral reasons. This conceptualisation is important; by uncovering the different characters and subjects of failure, scholars can now move on from definition, and concentrate efforts on explaining why policy failure happens and is often repeated. So far, three approaches dominate empirical studies (see Chapter 1): policy stages explanations (for example, implementation analysis); analyses that treat failure as a function of specific political institutions or people (for example, leadership studies); and, analyses examining organisational capacity (for example, policy tool analysis). This chapter is located in the third tradition.

Most capacity-related accounts treat the failure to translate policy ideas into reality as a function of the poor design of policy tools. Here, we take a different tack using theories of policy learning to understand policy failure; where failure is treated as a ‘degeneration’ of policy learning. Analytically, the chapter drills down on the rational ideal type of policy learning – epistemic learning. This is the realm of evidence-based policy making (EBPM), where experts advise decision-makers on issues of technical complexity (see Ingold and Monaghan, 2016 for a recent discussion). Empirically, the chapter presents a policy failure whose causes are rooted in the process of policy making. Specifically, the management of bovine tuberculosis (BTB) in England since 1997 is conceptualised as a failure of epistemic learning – where learning processes degenerated as the result of various weaknesses in government's management of its relationship with an epistemic community established to advise it. Drawing on documentary evidence and interviews with 54 elites (scientists, policy makers and interest group actors), management failures in BTB are analysed as problems of learning about different aspects of organisational capacity.