This predilection for the "endless reinventing of wheels" – as one former Treasury permanent secretary put it – wastes money, stymies innovation, explains policy failures and contributes to broader public disillusionment and democratic disaffection. More recently, the work of the Public Administration Select Committee, under the chairmanship of Sir Bernard Jenkin, repeatedly shone a spotlight on the issue and the All Change report of 2017 by Emma Norris and Robert Adam provided a forensic analysis of why British government has a tendency to recreate policies and an inability to learn from the past. Lord Peter Hennessy’s magisterial book Whitehall provides an authoritative account of the challenge. The reasons for this are complex and involve a mixture of laws and conventions, poor record keeping and high levels of "churn" within the corridors of power that could almost have been designed to destroy institutional memory. The policy problem is very simple: policymaking in Whitehall is bound by a form of structural amnesia, which makes it very hard, if not impossible, for today’s politicians and policy-makers to learn lessons from the past. Add to this a clear link into the world of academe and debates about the role of university researchers and the story becomes even more perplexing. The idea that the time machine and spaceship might have arrived with the sole intention of helping to solve a policy problem that has been recognised but remained unsolved for decades seems even more fanciful. Yet amnesia, and to some extent memory, continue to be concepts that are neglected, or referred to tangentially, by mainstream crisis scholars.The idea of Dr Who’s Tardis suddenly appearing on the green in Parliament Square – teleported from some far-away galaxy and different time or dimension – might, at first glance, appear ridiculously far-fetched. The effects that institutional amnesia has on these three important areas illuminate its relevance to crisis analysis. In particular, memory loss can be seen to influence crisis decision-making that relies upon historical analogy, crisis learning which demands that learned lessons are formally institutionalized across time, and meaning-making efforts, which draw upon recollections of the past to justify political projects in the present. Institutional amnesia can affect the performance of crisis management policies and the politics of crises more generally. The analysis of the effects of amnesia in each of these areas reveals the profound effects that it can have on various aspects of crisis management. This means conceptualizing institutional amnesia in broader terms as something that influences individual crisis managers, the formal institutional aspects of crisis management agencies, the cultural dimensions of those agencies, and the wider systemic location within which both actors and agencies reside. However, the concept requires to be defined more expansively so that its causes and effects can be fully understood in relation to crises and crisis management. Institutional amnesia can be defined in simple terms as an organization’s inability to recall and use historical knowledge for present-day purposes.
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