Learning among Regional Governments. Quality of Policy Learning and Policy Transfer in Regional Lifelong Learning Policies

The research programme has been designed to investigate in what ways the regional governments can upgrade the quality of policies affecting vocational education and training, and, more generally, lifelong learning, through transactional cooperation and mutual learning. This initial volume presents a model for cooperation between regional governments, simplified in comparison with the Open Method of Coordination, yet still able to support policy learning and policy transfer. A second volume contains all the empirical material, the methodological procedure and a presentation of the support system. The proposed model is the outcome of an applied research initiative which has, over a period of two years, directly involved the regional governments of Andalusia, the Basque country, Tuscany (acting as coordinator), Vastra Gotaland, Vidin, and Wales, under the direction of Earlall and with the support of three research centres (Florence University, Orebro University and the Deutsches Institut für Erwachsenenbildung). Over this period of time (2005-2007), members of the regional governments, civil servants and researchers have established a mutual learning process dealing with the policies of lifelong learning (initially dealing only with the areas of informal adult learning and the drop-out situation) and from there they moved on to the actual and effective transfer of concrete measures for the activation of the policies. This process has been planned, monitored and assessed using suitable backup and observation tools. This has made it possible to gather a large quantity of empirical material on both institutional learning pathways and on the more complex routes of policy transfer and innovation, based on transnational cooperation. This has been enormously useful, since it has made it possible to observe the phenomenon as it develops over the long term: cases occurring over a period of more than seven years have been reconstructed. However, the cooperative and voluntary transfer procedures turned out to be smoother than expected, which means that in some cases it has been possible to directly observe the phases of the progress from policy learning to policy transfer over the course of the research.