First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this updated volume explores policy failures and the valuable opportunities for learning that they offer. Policy successes and failures offer important lessons for public officials, but often they do not learn from these experiences. The studies in this volume investigate this broken link. The book defines policy learning and failure and organises the main studies in these fields along the key dimensions of processes, products and analytical levels. Drawing together a range of experts in the field, the volume sketches a research agenda linking policy scholars with policy practice.

Governments around the world are clamouring to engage the private sector in order to build infrastructure and deliver public services. However, the role of the state in managing new relationships with companies is often murky. Is the government a slow and wasteful bureaucracy that must be held at bay or is it a necessary authority? Assessing the appropriate role for governments within these partnerships and the factors that lead to their success or failure, Governing Public-Private Partnerships delves into two examples of collaborative projects in urban transportation: Vancouver's Canada Line and the Sydney Airport Rail Link. Through personal interviews with CEOs, senior bureaucrats, and politicians, Joshua Newman compares the strategies pursued by an active and shrewd provincial government in British Columbia with the more hands-off state government in New South Wales, Australia. By supporting networks of players in the transportation game, actively seeking lessons from international experience, and innovating responses to novel policy problems, the public sector was able to lead the Canada Line partnership to operational success. In Sydney, however, the unwillingness of the state government to manage the partnership resulted in a sluggish Airport Link that, after sixteen years in operation, still has not met its original expectations. At a time of renewed interest in private involvement with public services, Governing Public-Private Partnerships provides an in-depth look into how the state can - and must - remain involved.