Policy learning from crises: lessons learned from the Italian food stamp programme

Advancing learning is a central tenet for improving public action. Recent calls for agility, robustness, prototyping and other strategies for coping with crises imply continual learning and improvement. This article contributes to challenging this ideal interpretation of the learning process. It provides conceptual and methodological tools to investigate the relationship between policy learning and policy change and sheds light on the diverse dynamics and types of learning that can emerge from crises. At the conceptual level, the article presents a learning matrix that classifies the possible outcomes in the relationship between learning and change. On methods, our research design includes process tracing, binary comparisons, and an innovative real-time approach to the study of learning. The article investigates three municipal case studies from the Italian food stamp programme implemented during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The repetition of the programme over a short period of time offers the opportunity to investigate inter-crisis learning, the process by which lessons from the first wave of implementation contributed to reforms in the second delivery. The coronavirus crisis magnified the acquisition of knowledge and provided radical inter-programme lessons – long-term, non-incremental learning beyond the management of the emergency. Yet, the findings also highlight how this window of opportunity for learning quickly closed and how certain lessons learned may be lost in the process of reform, hard to implement or are unlikely to be extrapolated across contexts.