Traumatic renewal of values and value criteria in crisis management

Abstract

This work tries to be an empirical sample in the study of learning in public policies, that is, how learning is linked to policy change. Particularly, we have studied political-administrative elites’ learning process on crisis provoked by oil spill off the coast of Spain. After expounded our premises about policy learning and the working hypothesis that have guided our work, we explain the methodology we have employed: the Nominal Group Technique, its advantages in this kind of research and how we used it. Finally, we display the reflection generated from the empirical work to better understand policy learning process. In this sense, political factors have been revealed as absolutely essential in order to explain what political-administrative elites learn and whatever they decide to implement. Aspects that make crises different from each other (these being technical aspects) show up as less important than political ones. Political aspects make crisis similar, because of political reasons behind the decision, communication, and attention strategies. Two concepts have appeared as the connection of crisis and elites’ learning: sensitization and political profitability. The former means the process of becoming fully aware of the problem, being concerned about it, and predisposed towards a faster and more coherent action. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine a government undertaking polices that involve political costs, or anything proved to be unprofitable. This is especially true of learning and implementation of whatever has been learnt from crisis that happened in distant points of time.