Bishoy L Zaki
Biographic Data
| ID | 4383882 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bishoy L Zaki |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bishoy L |
| FAMILY NAME | Zaki |
| SIGNATURE | ZAKI B L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7962-6812 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 100 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Policy Learning: Mapping the Conceptual Minefield
Policy learning has become a central and widely deployed lens in public policy and administration research. Yet policy learning's success has also produced paradoxical effects. Decades of scholarship have generated a dense conceptual terrain populated by numerous constructs and learning descriptors that are often unclearly positioned and frequently collapsed into the broad label of “learning types.” The result is persistent conceptual ambiguity t…
Policy Learning and Policy Analysis Within European Union Institutions: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda
Policy learning plays a central role in both the survival and development of the European Union, serving as an institutional policymaking and governance logic. Yet, while research taking policy learning as an explicit theoretical lens to policy analysis within EU institutions provides several important contributions, it remains fragmented and relatively scarce, especially compared to that on the member states' level. Through a scoping systematic …
Toward a Theory of Value as Praxis: Linking Public Values and Public Value
Literature on value developed along two influential interpretations: public values as normative expectations about policymaking and governance and public value expressing added or lost benefits experienced through public action. Although normatively linked, these interpretations evolved as separate streams, limiting conceptual clarity and cumulative analysis. In response, this article develops “value as praxis” as an analytical framework that tre…
Policy learning within and across European institutions: Charting the path towards European integration
Policy learning has long been considered central to the functioning and growth of the European Union (EU). This led to scholarly interest in policy learning by (EU) Institutions to surge over the years, positioning the learning lens as a potent explainer of why European Institutions do what they do, as a function of how, what, and why they learn about policy and governance problems. Building on this progress, and as a corollary, theorists and stu…
Conceptualising organisational policy learning: Triggers, processes, outcomes, and implications for policy and governance change
Policy learning literature acknowledges the importance of accounting for how learning aggregates across three different analytical levels—micro, meso, and macro—to better understand learning's contribution to policy change. Yet, a missing link in this causal architecture persists, particularly concerning how public organisations undertake policy learning aiming to influence policymaking and governance, a process rarely studied yet often conflated…
Policymaking in an age of polycrises: Emerging perspectives
Policymaking has witnessed significant changes over the past decades, most of which stem from perturbations in the context where policy is made. These developments have emphasized considerable shortcomings of conventional approaches to both theories and practices of policymaking, whether in terms of policy design or analysis. Accordingly, several new theoretical approaches emerged to better understand the new reality of policymaking, including wi…
Measuring Policy Learning: Challenges and Good Practices
How can we empirically identify and measure policy learning? Through a problematized review, we develop a novel perspective to identifying, explaining, and addressing interconnected ontological, theoretical-contextual, and consequently, methodological challenges in the measurement of policy learning. We de-compose measurement as a three-fold endeavor, concerning: conceptual foundations, the design of measurement instruments, and their deployment …
Policy learning and the Covid‐19 crisis: A systematic review of scholarship and key lessons for research and practice
Expanding the horizon of policy learning
Policy learning is an established conceptual and analytical framework to study the policy process. Its progress as a research agenda hinges on solid micro-foundations, its integration with other policy process theories, the consideration of both positive and negative cases (of learning and change) from diverse continents and countries, and the clarification of the causal pathways connecting individual learning to decisions and change. We sketch t…
Hello darkness my old friend: How policy learning can contribute to value destruction
For decades, policy learning has been often viewed as a force for the common good, a process that aims at creating value for the public through problem‐solving. While learning can indeed contribute to value creation, darkness also lurks therein, where learning can also contribute to value destruction. Yet, the dark side of policy learning remains under‐explored and under‐theorized, particularly going beyond meso‐level policy and organizational fa…
Policy learning and policy innovation: Interactions and Intersections
The links between policy learning and policy innovation seem self-evident. Yet these areas of scholarship have developed independently of each other. The articles in this Special Issue all address some aspect of the learning/innovation relationship. This introduction sets the scene by reviewing how innovation intersects with studies of policy learning. To do this, we explore the three key dimensions which characterise policy innovation, as define…
Policy learning governance: A New Perspective on Agency Across Policy Learning Theories
The predominant ontological position on agency in policy learning literature has been relatively learner-oriented, thus focusing on policy actors puzzling about policy problems. In other words, it focuses on how actors acquire, translate, and disseminate knowledge and information to address policy problems or ‘puzzles’. However, despite its influence on learning and its outcomes, policy actors’ powering, or agency in shaping learning processes ha…
Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy
We provide an historical overview of the evolution of knowledge exchange architecture for climate policy in the EU. We investigate whether evolutions in the knowledge architecture reflect shifts in the politicisation of climate change. First, we outline a conceptualisation of politicisation that accounts for two types of effects: prioritisation leading to enabling conditions for knowledge exchange, and polarisation leading to constraining conditi…
Understanding political learning by scientific experts: A case of EU climate policy
Research often explores the role of scientific expertise in policymaking from an externalised perspective, mostly focusing on how policymakers use and abuse scientific expertise through political learning. However, very little is known about political learning by scientific experts. What strategies do they use to maintain and advance their access to, and influence on policymaking? Using process tracing, we illustrate how scientific experts' acces…
Beyond powering and puzzling: The Political Dimensions of Policy Learning
Over the years, policy learning has emerged as a theoretical lens to provide an alternative understanding of powering-based approaches to the policy process and policy outcomes. This has been a success story, with policy learning gaining presence among theoretical frameworks on the policy process. However, the puzzling-powering dichotomy is reductive. In real-world policy processes, we find both puzzling and powering. Also, we cannot reduce the v…
Jonathan C. KAMKHAJI, Policy learning and the Euro. The EU's responses to the sovereign debt crisis
Why do actors in the world of policy do what they do? This remains a quintessential question in public policy scholarship. It is intriguing not only for academics, but also for a public often puzzled by trying to understand the “why” and “how” of government action as well as inaction. Policy learning scholarship tries to answer this question by investigating why policy actors do what they do as a function of what and how they learn about policy i…
How does policy learning take place across a multilevel governance architecture during crises
Policy learning plays a significant role in shaping policy during crises. While scholarship has explored many of the mechanisms and outcomes of such learning, little is known about how policy learning takes place across different levels of a multilevel governance architecture. This is despite their prevalence and influence on crisis responses. Using a case of the Belgian COVID-19 policy response, we explore how policy learning takes place across …
Policy learning type shifts during creeping crises: A storyboard of Covid‐19 driven learning in Belgium
Understandings of different policy learning types have matured over recent decades. However, relatively little is known about their nonlinear and interactive nature, particularly within crisis contexts. In this article, we explore how two of the most prominent learning types (instrumental and social) shifted and interacted during the COVID‐19 crisis. To do so, we created a policy learning storyboard of the Belgian COVID‐19 policy response over 2 …
Contagious inequality: Economic disparities and excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to consider multiple and often novel perspectives on contemporary policymaking in the context of technically complex, ambiguous, and large-scale crises. In this article, we focus on exploring a territory that remains relatively unchartered on a large scale, namely the relationship between economic inequalities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a dataset of 25 European countries …
In trust we trust: The impact of trust in government on excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward myriad challenges to public policy, central of which is understanding the different contextual factors that can influence the effectiveness of policy responses across different systems. In this article, we explore how trust in government can influence the ability of COVID-19 policy responses to curb excess mortality during the pandemic. Our findings indicate that stringent policy responses play a central …
Policy learning governance: A New Perspective on Agency Across Policy Learning Theories
The predominant ontological position on agency in policy learning literature has been relatively learner-oriented, thus focusing on policy actors puzzling about policy problems. In other words, it focuses on how actors acquire, translate, and disseminate knowledge and information to address policy problems or ‘puzzles’. However, despite its influence on learning and its outcomes, policy actors’ powering, or agency in shaping learning processes ha…
How does policy learning take place across a multilevel governance architecture during crises
Policy learning plays a significant role in shaping policy during crises. While scholarship has explored many of the mechanisms and outcomes of such learning, little is known about how policy learning takes place across different levels of a multilevel governance architecture. This is despite their prevalence and influence on crisis responses. Using a case of the Belgian COVID-19 policy response, we explore how policy learning takes place across …
Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy
We provide an historical overview of the evolution of knowledge exchange architecture for climate policy in the EU. We investigate whether evolutions in the knowledge architecture reflect shifts in the politicisation of climate change. First, we outline a conceptualisation of politicisation that accounts for two types of effects: prioritisation leading to enabling conditions for knowledge exchange, and polarisation leading to constraining conditi…
Policy learning type shifts during creeping crises: A storyboard of Covid‐19 driven learning in Belgium
Understandings of different policy learning types have matured over recent decades. However, relatively little is known about their nonlinear and interactive nature, particularly within crisis contexts. In this article, we explore how two of the most prominent learning types (instrumental and social) shifted and interacted during the COVID‐19 crisis. To do so, we created a policy learning storyboard of the Belgian COVID‐19 policy response over 2 …
In trust we trust: The impact of trust in government on excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward myriad challenges to public policy, central of which is understanding the different contextual factors that can influence the effectiveness of policy responses across different systems. In this article, we explore how trust in government can influence the ability of COVID-19 policy responses to curb excess mortality during the pandemic. Our findings indicate that stringent policy responses play a central …
Understanding political learning by scientific experts: A case of EU climate policy
Research often explores the role of scientific expertise in policymaking from an externalised perspective, mostly focusing on how policymakers use and abuse scientific expertise through political learning. However, very little is known about political learning by scientific experts. What strategies do they use to maintain and advance their access to, and influence on policymaking? Using process tracing, we illustrate how scientific experts' acces…
Beyond powering and puzzling: The Political Dimensions of Policy Learning
Over the years, policy learning has emerged as a theoretical lens to provide an alternative understanding of powering-based approaches to the policy process and policy outcomes. This has been a success story, with policy learning gaining presence among theoretical frameworks on the policy process. However, the puzzling-powering dichotomy is reductive. In real-world policy processes, we find both puzzling and powering. Also, we cannot reduce the v…
Policy learning and policy innovation: Interactions and Intersections
The links between policy learning and policy innovation seem self-evident. Yet these areas of scholarship have developed independently of each other. The articles in this Special Issue all address some aspect of the learning/innovation relationship. This introduction sets the scene by reviewing how innovation intersects with studies of policy learning. To do this, we explore the three key dimensions which characterise policy innovation, as define…
Hello darkness my old friend: How policy learning can contribute to value destruction
For decades, policy learning has been often viewed as a force for the common good, a process that aims at creating value for the public through problem‐solving. While learning can indeed contribute to value creation, darkness also lurks therein, where learning can also contribute to value destruction. Yet, the dark side of policy learning remains under‐explored and under‐theorized, particularly going beyond meso‐level policy and organizational fa…
Contagious inequality: Economic disparities and excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to consider multiple and often novel perspectives on contemporary policymaking in the context of technically complex, ambiguous, and large-scale crises. In this article, we focus on exploring a territory that remains relatively unchartered on a large scale, namely the relationship between economic inequalities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a dataset of 25 European countries …
Policy learning within and across European institutions: Charting the path towards European integration
Policy learning has long been considered central to the functioning and growth of the European Union (EU). This led to scholarly interest in policy learning by (EU) Institutions to surge over the years, positioning the learning lens as a potent explainer of why European Institutions do what they do, as a function of how, what, and why they learn about policy and governance problems. Building on this progress, and as a corollary, theorists and stu…
Policy learning type shifts during creeping crises: A storyboard of Covid‐19 driven learning in Belgium
Understandings of different policy learning types have matured over recent decades. However, relatively little is known about their nonlinear and interactive nature, particularly within crisis contexts. In this article, we explore how two of the most prominent learning types (instrumental and social) shifted and interacted during the COVID‐19 crisis. To do so, we created a policy learning storyboard of the Belgian COVID‐19 policy response over 2 …
Contagious inequality: Economic disparities and excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to consider multiple and often novel perspectives on contemporary policymaking in the context of technically complex, ambiguous, and large-scale crises. In this article, we focus on exploring a territory that remains relatively unchartered on a large scale, namely the relationship between economic inequalities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a dataset of 25 European countries …
In trust we trust: The impact of trust in government on excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward myriad challenges to public policy, central of which is understanding the different contextual factors that can influence the effectiveness of policy responses across different systems. In this article, we explore how trust in government can influence the ability of COVID-19 policy responses to curb excess mortality during the pandemic. Our findings indicate that stringent policy responses play a central …
Jonathan C. KAMKHAJI, Policy learning and the Euro. The EU's responses to the sovereign debt crisis
Why do actors in the world of policy do what they do? This remains a quintessential question in public policy scholarship. It is intriguing not only for academics, but also for a public often puzzled by trying to understand the “why” and “how” of government action as well as inaction. Policy learning scholarship tries to answer this question by investigating why policy actors do what they do as a function of what and how they learn about policy i…
How does policy learning take place across a multilevel governance architecture during crises
Policy learning plays a significant role in shaping policy during crises. While scholarship has explored many of the mechanisms and outcomes of such learning, little is known about how policy learning takes place across different levels of a multilevel governance architecture. This is despite their prevalence and influence on crisis responses. Using a case of the Belgian COVID-19 policy response, we explore how policy learning takes place across …
Policymaking in an age of polycrises: Emerging perspectives
Policymaking has witnessed significant changes over the past decades, most of which stem from perturbations in the context where policy is made. These developments have emphasized considerable shortcomings of conventional approaches to both theories and practices of policymaking, whether in terms of policy design or analysis. Accordingly, several new theoretical approaches emerged to better understand the new reality of policymaking, including wi…
Measuring Policy Learning: Challenges and Good Practices
How can we empirically identify and measure policy learning? Through a problematized review, we develop a novel perspective to identifying, explaining, and addressing interconnected ontological, theoretical-contextual, and consequently, methodological challenges in the measurement of policy learning. We de-compose measurement as a three-fold endeavor, concerning: conceptual foundations, the design of measurement instruments, and their deployment …
Policy learning and the Covid‐19 crisis: A systematic review of scholarship and key lessons for research and practice
Expanding the horizon of policy learning
Policy learning is an established conceptual and analytical framework to study the policy process. Its progress as a research agenda hinges on solid micro-foundations, its integration with other policy process theories, the consideration of both positive and negative cases (of learning and change) from diverse continents and countries, and the clarification of the causal pathways connecting individual learning to decisions and change. We sketch t…
Hello darkness my old friend: How policy learning can contribute to value destruction
For decades, policy learning has been often viewed as a force for the common good, a process that aims at creating value for the public through problem‐solving. While learning can indeed contribute to value creation, darkness also lurks therein, where learning can also contribute to value destruction. Yet, the dark side of policy learning remains under‐explored and under‐theorized, particularly going beyond meso‐level policy and organizational fa…
Policy learning and policy innovation: Interactions and Intersections
The links between policy learning and policy innovation seem self-evident. Yet these areas of scholarship have developed independently of each other. The articles in this Special Issue all address some aspect of the learning/innovation relationship. This introduction sets the scene by reviewing how innovation intersects with studies of policy learning. To do this, we explore the three key dimensions which characterise policy innovation, as define…
Policy learning governance: A New Perspective on Agency Across Policy Learning Theories
The predominant ontological position on agency in policy learning literature has been relatively learner-oriented, thus focusing on policy actors puzzling about policy problems. In other words, it focuses on how actors acquire, translate, and disseminate knowledge and information to address policy problems or ‘puzzles’. However, despite its influence on learning and its outcomes, policy actors’ powering, or agency in shaping learning processes ha…
Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy
We provide an historical overview of the evolution of knowledge exchange architecture for climate policy in the EU. We investigate whether evolutions in the knowledge architecture reflect shifts in the politicisation of climate change. First, we outline a conceptualisation of politicisation that accounts for two types of effects: prioritisation leading to enabling conditions for knowledge exchange, and polarisation leading to constraining conditi…
Understanding political learning by scientific experts: A case of EU climate policy
Research often explores the role of scientific expertise in policymaking from an externalised perspective, mostly focusing on how policymakers use and abuse scientific expertise through political learning. However, very little is known about political learning by scientific experts. What strategies do they use to maintain and advance their access to, and influence on policymaking? Using process tracing, we illustrate how scientific experts' acces…
Beyond powering and puzzling: The Political Dimensions of Policy Learning
Over the years, policy learning has emerged as a theoretical lens to provide an alternative understanding of powering-based approaches to the policy process and policy outcomes. This has been a success story, with policy learning gaining presence among theoretical frameworks on the policy process. However, the puzzling-powering dichotomy is reductive. In real-world policy processes, we find both puzzling and powering. Also, we cannot reduce the v…
Policy learning within and across European institutions: Charting the path towards European integration
Policy learning has long been considered central to the functioning and growth of the European Union (EU). This led to scholarly interest in policy learning by (EU) Institutions to surge over the years, positioning the learning lens as a potent explainer of why European Institutions do what they do, as a function of how, what, and why they learn about policy and governance problems. Building on this progress, and as a corollary, theorists and stu…
Conceptualising organisational policy learning: Triggers, processes, outcomes, and implications for policy and governance change
Policy learning literature acknowledges the importance of accounting for how learning aggregates across three different analytical levels—micro, meso, and macro—to better understand learning's contribution to policy change. Yet, a missing link in this causal architecture persists, particularly concerning how public organisations undertake policy learning aiming to influence policymaking and governance, a process rarely studied yet often conflated…
Policy Learning: Mapping the Conceptual Minefield
Policy learning has become a central and widely deployed lens in public policy and administration research. Yet policy learning's success has also produced paradoxical effects. Decades of scholarship have generated a dense conceptual terrain populated by numerous constructs and learning descriptors that are often unclearly positioned and frequently collapsed into the broad label of “learning types.” The result is persistent conceptual ambiguity t…
Policy Learning and Policy Analysis Within European Union Institutions: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda
Policy learning plays a central role in both the survival and development of the European Union, serving as an institutional policymaking and governance logic. Yet, while research taking policy learning as an explicit theoretical lens to policy analysis within EU institutions provides several important contributions, it remains fragmented and relatively scarce, especially compared to that on the member states' level. Through a scoping systematic …
Toward a Theory of Value as Praxis: Linking Public Values and Public Value
Literature on value developed along two influential interpretations: public values as normative expectations about policymaking and governance and public value expressing added or lost benefits experienced through public action. Although normatively linked, these interpretations evolved as separate streams, limiting conceptual clarity and cumulative analysis. In response, this article develops “value as praxis” as an analytical framework that tre…
Policy Transfer and Learning (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Policy learning (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Corporate governance (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (5 works)