Left on the shelf: Explaining the failure of public inquiry recommendations

Abstract

AbstractPublic inquiries remain the pre‐eminent mechanism for lesson‐learning after high‐profile failures. However, a regular complaint is that their recommendations get ‘shelved’. In political science, the most common explanation for this lack of implementation tells us that elites mobilize bias in order to undermine inquiry lesson‐learning. This article tests this thesis via an international comparison of inquiries in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. A series of alternative explanations for shelving emerge, which tell us that inquiry recommendations do not get implemented when: they do not respect the realities of policy transfer; they are triaged into policy refinement mechanisms; and they arrive at the ‘street level’ without consideration of local delivery capacities. These explanations tell us that the mobilization of bias thesis needs to be reworked in relation to public inquiries so that it better recognizes the complex reality of public policy in the modern state.