Organisational learning practices among overburdened foreign aid bureaucrats in Germany, Norway and South Korea

Drawing on almost one hundred expert interviews in three foreign aid agencies, this paper contributes to a broader literature on the politics of bureaucratic practices within public administrations in advanced democracies. Specifically, we seek to unpack the ‘black box’ of organisational learning (OL) practices amid bureaucratic overburdening. We focus on three national development bureaucracies: the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Republic of Korea’s International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). We prompt randomly selected interviewees in these three bureaucracies to substantiate their interpretations of OL through storytelling on individual experiences and organisational practices. Taking the reality of overburdening seriously, we thus develop an inductive conceptualisation of OL in foreign aid agencies that is attentive to context-specific sociopolitical dynamics and organisational constraints. We find that variation in OL is contingent upon country-specific political embeddedness of development cooperation, different propensities to collectively address past mistakes in order not to repeat them, and individual choices informed by resulting incentive structures. At the same time, one uniform effect of these determinants of OL is that so-called strategic or ‘double-loop’ learning is limited as aid agencies are constrained in their efforts to pursue sometimes competing priorities of political principals. Our data also illustrate that ‘islands of excellence’ or ‘pockets of effectiveness’ exist despite overburdening, yet individual learning does not translate into effective OL if opportunities for collective meaning-making among bureaucrats with different motivations and competing objectives remain limited.