Effectively managing problems of sustainability requires collaboration and learning among the individuals and organizations who participate in the policy process. Empirical work on policy networks notes that the fragmentation of many policy networks inhibits information exchange and collaboration across certain critical boundaries. For example, many networks are fragmented across ideological boundaries, functional domains, and vertical levels of government. This research focuses on the effect of these fragmentations on actors’ ability to learn policy strategies to effectively manage complex problems of sustainability, and the potential for collaborative policy-making institutions to create networks that bridge these commonly-observed fragmentations.

According to an Institutional Collective Action (ICA) perspective, collaborative policy making institutions can reduce fragmentation—and enhance learning outcomes—by lowering the transaction costs of collaboration across these critical boundaries. On the other hand, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) argues that ideological conflict is a primary barrier to learning, and in most situations collaborative institutions are unlikely to manage these conflicts due to deep cognitive biases that prevent actors from separating technical debates from ideological or value-oriented conflicts.

These hypotheses are tested in the context of transportation and land use planning across five California regions, each of which has experimented with an innovative collaborative process meant to promote collaboration and policy learning. Regression analysis and exponential random graph (ERG) models are used to examine the extent to which network positions influence perceptions of learning, and whether collaborative institutions appear to change the structural features of policy networks in these regions. Results underscore the importance of non-hierarchical information exchange relationships in promoting learning within complex issue domains, although the results also suggest that persistent ideological conflict is an important barrier to learning even within collaborative processes.