Policy failures, policy learning and institutional change: The case of Australian health insurance policy change

Although policy learning may stem from assessments of policy failure (Ingold and Monaghan, 2016), establishing such a relationship is not straightforward. As is well known, the drivers of policy change and observations of policy change are not necessarily closely linked across time; indeed, the temporal link between cause and effect may be stretched over relatively long periods in patterns of change (McCashin, 2016). The chapter seeks to introduce a temporal perspective to catalogue the institutional constraints and opportunities embedded in sequences of repeated policy failure; and the subsequent ability of reform advocates to learn how to use the opportunities presented...