ABSTRACT
Do policymakers learn from past policy failures? In a rational model, one expects policymakers to learn from previous policy errors, but this seems not to be the case. Repeated policy mistakes continue to be the hallmark in both developed and developing worlds, even though policy failures present valuable and multiple opportunities for policy learning, especially in Africa. With high-profile policy failures in Africa, we expect that learning lessons from such failures will be paramount to policymakers. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case. Focusing on the recent electricity privatization fiasco in Ghana, this chapter examines factors that impede or affect policymakers’ ability to learn from previous policy failures. It shows how policy politicization, policy diffusion, budget constraints, coercive policy imposition, elite corruption, etc. form key impediments to policy learning while resulting in more policy failures than successes.
