Back to the Micro :Policy Actor Learning in Collaborative Arrangement

What policy actors learn is a core dimension of learning process. Exploring the type of knowledge acquired and the depth of cognitive changes it induces is not only a matter of measurement but also a crucial step in the identification of the causes and the consequences of policy learning. Merging insights from both the policy and the social learning literature, this paper develops a typology and a method that captures what individual policy actor in multi-stakeholder learns – the micro-level of learning. Based on Leach et al. (2014)’s definition of learning, it distinguishes acquisition of knowledge from change in opinion. It assess separately four types of learning according to the type knowledge acquired (policy, political, relational and self-learning) and looks at the direction of the opinion changes. Those developments are applied to two collaborative arrangements dealing with environmental issues, following a method inspired by the mixed-method approach