1Why do actors in the world of policy do what they do? This remains a quintessential question in public policy scholarship. It is intriguing not only for academics, but also for a public often puzzled by trying to understand the “why” and “how” of government action as well as inaction. Policy learning scholarship tries to answer this question by investigating why policy actors do what they do as a function of what and how they learn about policy issues. In this view of the world, learning is understood as a process that “motivates action”, and the implications of researching this are considerable. How learning takes place has been shown to affect how coalitions rise or collapse, how paradigms are transformed, and how policy instruments are maintained, adjusted, or scrapped. In a world of increasingly complex policy problems and crises, these learning processes, when optimal, can contribute to commendable success; although, if misdirected, learning can lead to lingering fiascos (Dunlop, James, & Radaelli, 2019).
2In a very engaging and accessible manner, Policy Learning and the Euro adopts this lens to investigate the why and how of the European Union’s crisis governance, and the processes of European integration. In this book, Jonathan Kamkhaji offers a thorough analysis of policy learning within the context of fiscal policy coordination under the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Specifically, the book investigates the role of learning in the demise of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and the emergence of a new European fiscal framework and economic governance architecture in response to the 2009 sovereign debt crisis — with a focus on the Greek case. The book focuses on two case studies covering three periods of fiscal policy by presenting a stimulating storyline: “The quiet before the storm (2008-2009)”, “crisis contingent learning and polity change (2009-2010)”, and “a new season of policy change focused on the epistemic construction of a new policy paradigm (2010-2013)”. To do so, Kamkhaji leverages the ground-breaking work of Dunlop & Radaelli (2013), identifying four main modes by which policy learning takes place — hierarchal, bargaining-oriented, epistemic, and reflexive — as causal mechanisms of policy change.
3The convergence between the ontological approach and the empirical case is insightful. Ontologically, learning is presented as a communicative collective information-processing activity. Taking a rather positivist approach, the book cleverly positions learning as an omnipresent ontology of policymaking that exists regardless of learning quality or causal implications (i.e., positing — reasonably — that information production and dissemination occurs everywhere). In doing so, the author adeptly manoeuvres a long-standing challenge in identifying whether learning takes place or not. Methodologically, the book does an outstanding job of showcasing how theory-testing process tracing can be used to appraise the causal influence of policy learning on policy outcomes. It is one of the relatively few robust methodological attempts at studying the causal influence of policy learning in recent years, particularly as it offers a clear logical mechanism of causal inference and a nuanced well-caveated approach to measuring learning.
4The book uses several key conceptual positions as departure points. First, that policy learning is not a mutually exclusive causal explainer of European integration; rather, it is one of many processes that — alongside others — facilitate policy and governance adjustments within the complex EU context. Second, that the outcome object of learning (i.e., the EMU) is not a monolithic body; rather, it is a coherent, complex, and multi-layered set of regimes designed to achieve the supranational coordination of economic policymaking. In so doing, the arguments presented are built on a real-life multilevel understanding of the learning process and its relationship with policy change. This is something often encouraged in policy-learning literature, yet not often pursued with sufficient nuance.
5One of this book’s significant contribution is that it theorizes — and empirically traces — “contingent learning” (p. 79) as a new learning mechanism. In contingent learning, under acute crisis conditions, which can be cast as “change or die scenarios”, policy change takes place to avoid imminent harm, before “real” learning by inference happens (p. 91). While this has several implications for policy analysis, I find that the most important is that it helps future research to avoid a significant pitfall of identifying learning. Learning is commonly identified through observing policy change: to put it simply, with some theorization, we see policy change and thus we assume that learning has already happened and this is why we see change. This approach to identifying learning has often formed our basic understanding of how learning takes place, and what its outcomes are. However, unravelling the mechanism of contingent learning gives policy-learning scholarship another scenario to think about: under certain conditions, this change that we observe, even with some ex-ante assumption that learning could have taken place, might not necessarily be a sign of learning. This constitutes a major step toward avoiding Type II errors (false positives) concerning the identification of learning, a common malaise of policy-learning research. Another contribution of this book is that — in policy learning — it brings one of the causal explanatory variables for the high politics of EU governance and European integration through robust theorization, something that has been scarce in scholarship.
6Policy learning and the Euro offers several important and valuable findings for research and practice. In addition to further entrenching policy learning as one of the key causal explainers of European integration, the book also delves deep into the role of epistemic agency and expertise in inducing both instrumental and paradigmatic changes, particularly in crisis conditions. This work has been quite helpful in understanding the dynamics of policy change in the recent COVID-19 crisis, on both the European level (Ladi & Tsarouhas, 2020) and the national level (Zaki, Pattyn, & Wayenberg, 2022).
7Perhaps one of the issues that could have been further addressed in this book is the simultaneity of contingent learning with previously theorised and often studied inferential learning. This refers to whether various actor groups within the EU system experienced the same crisis differently, and thus went through different mechanisms of learning — for example, some inferential and some contingent. Additionally, the book could bring benefits from having more reflections on the threshold after which scholars can ascertain whether contingent or inferential learning has taken place, or maybe on whether this is more of a spectrum or a sliding scale between two mechanisms of learning.
8In conclusion, having read this book, I find it one of the most engaging contributions on policy learning within the context of European integration over the past few years. It is highly suitable for both academics and practitioners, for those with experience and knowledge of policy-learning literature, as well as those new to the field. I believe that this book offers a comprehensive approach to policy learning, from a well-developed theoretical perspective to an exceptionally robust methodological framework, an enticing case, and intriguing findings. The book’s value is enhanced by its ability to explain, in a very accessible format, the dynamics of EU governance and integration within the shadow of crises which are becoming more commonplace within the EU context. I look forward to seeing future scholarship build on these findings so as to explore the full potential of contingent learning in understanding the dynamics of policy change in a world of crises across different contexts.