Policy learning and the public inquiry

Can public inquiries learn lessons in ways which can reduce the likelihood of future failure? Political science research has consistently stated that the answer to this question should be an emphatic no and defined the public inquiry as an ineffectual lesson-learning mechanism. This article, however, contends that this conventional wisdom needs to be revisited. Drawing upon policy learning research for its theory, and 100 interviews across four international cases for its evidence, this article returns to the question above and finds that inquiries regularly produce ‘instrumental’ and ‘cognitive organisational’ forms of learning, which propel substantive reform agendas. By contrasting these outcomes against the types of learning that inquiries struggle to produce, the article delivers a nuanced evaluation that indicates that we need to reconsider what we think we know about these important institutions.

     

Gramsci,the peasantry and popular culture

Antonio Gramsci adopted a developmentalist position after becoming a marxist. He thus departed from earlier Italian positions in foreseeing a society in which peasants — understood as a structure of petty property and its dependants ‐ would eventually though not immediately be peasants no more after the introduction of modern methods of cultivation. After the success of fascism in 1922 he began to reconsider his assumption that the peasantry were destined to disappear in a new mode of production, which would replace the backward dual economy of Italy. If the peasantry were not always in secular decline before the onward march of capitalism, but could, as in Italy, increase in numbers and political strength even under capitalism, then this called for a reassessment of their social and political role in a marxism which was not simply developmental in the old sense. In the 1930s in particular, Gramsci therefore started to develop strategies for change which assumed that: (1) the peasantry would remain in the foreseeable future as a significant political force; (2) their ethos and values would therefore have to be incorporated in any marxist theory of transition and socialism, and (3) developmentalism or modernisation would have to be re‐examined as a core part of marxist strategy.     

HIV/AIDS and governance along the corridors of conflict in West Africa

West Africa demonstrates a sub-regional pattern of violence and political instability that has engulfed Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and now extends out from these states through corridors of violent conflict throughout the region; both physical and figurative. This article makes two arguments. That HIV/AIDS has developed a complex inter-relationship with violent conflict in the West African sub-region; and that the presence of HIV/AIDS in West Africa in zones of violent conflict is not given the recognition needed by the international policy community. The neglect of West Africa in the Pan-African response to HIV/AIDS, and the intractability of the region's Complex Political Emergencies, is creating an emerging phenomenon of Complex Human Emergency in the region. An acknowledged gap exists in social analyses of HIV/AIDS between policy speculations and the actual evidence base that these are built upon. Instead of speculative theorizing, this article presents seven key questions that need to be asked about HIV/AIDS and conflict in West Africa, in order to begin the process of serious policy research on the issue.