Lesson Drawing for Theory, Policy and Practice: Developing a Future Agenda derived from Research Findings

In the field of public policy, there has been a long tradition of literature on policy transfer and learning with a recent renewed scholarly interest (Dunlop, Radaelli, and Trien, 2018) in learning from comparisons, after identifying where to look for lessons to be learnt.
Despite the need for caution because of the normative assumption that learning is always a good thing, we take the work of Rose (1993, 2004) as a starting point. We also acknowledge some of the difficulties in importing and applying policies from one domain to another, but argue that at least in highlighting issues, it is possible to create awareness on policy problems and also point out potential pitfalls for evaluating future consequences on policy action. The aim of this collection was not to perfect theory on either Vulnerability, policy transfer or lesson learning, but instead to encourage each contributor to add empirical, practical, theoretical and policy insights that could aid future research directions in studying the topic. The researchers were deliberately chosen for their multi-disciplinarity in approach, and all were academics and policy/practitioners drawn from a variety of social science disciplines such as public leadership and management, social policy and social work, criminology and policing, IT and cyberspace, and contributions were invited from front-line professionals who are, or were, in direct day-to-day contact with vulnerable individuals and groups; nationally and internationally. A primary concern was the continual appraisal of existing theoretical concepts and models and their application (or not?) to policy and practice in the second decade of the 21st Century.