Powering and puzzling: Offshore wind energy policy innovation, implementation, and learning in Massachusetts

Public policy is not created in a vacuum. Policymakers actively seek policy ideas, experiences, and knowledge from other governmental entities to reduce uncertainty and inform decision-making. Although the policy learning literature is well-developed, most studies focus on mature policies that have already diffused among many governments. Further, existing frameworks presume no distinction between policy invention and policy emulation, a far cry from Steve Jobs' axiom that "innovation distinguishes a leader and a follower." This study makes that distinction by exploring how Massachusetts and federal policymakers learned from policy models elsewhere as they crafted first-in-the-nation offshore wind energy policies.;In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of the study, and argue that the case of U.S. offshore wind energy policy formation does not readily apply to existing theories of policy learning. Chapter 2 details the context in which U.S. energy policy is crafted, demonstrating that supplanting fossil fuels with alternative sources of energy is a task without precedent. Chapter 3 reviews the policy learning literature, showing that we have narrow conceptions of why policymakers seek policy lessons from elsewhere, from whom they learn, what they learn, and how they interpret and apply lessons learned. Chapter 4 presents this study's research method and analytic approach, describing how mechanisms of policy learning were inferred from interviews with key policy actors, archival data, and contextual information. Chapter 5 describes offshore wind energy governance in Massachusetts. Chapter 6 narrates six specific policy learning processes, and explains which factors were most explanatory, and what mechanisms were inferred from the data.;The results suggest that, despite having only a few directly analogous policy models to learn from, policy learning was prevalent. Implementers first sought lessons from Denmark and the U.K., pioneers in offshore wind energy. Although they learned fundamental technical details and general environmental effects of offshore wind energy development, unique features of U.S. governance, and political circumstances, undermined emulation. As Chapter 7 concludes, this context---although unique---represents the new normal: governance in the face of substantial uncertainty.