Breaking the mould? How do policymakers learn from public housing estate renewal in a multi-actor environment?

The global housing affordability ‘crisis’ highlights a policy failure shared across many jurisdictions and countries: a disconnect between the affordability challenge and capacity to act. The renewal of public housing estates is often a critical flashpoint in this disconnect and provides a lens for analysing policy and action in the social and affordable housing subsystem. This article analyses and conceptualizes why disconnect between challenge and capacity to act persists by asking: ‘how do policymakers learn from public housing estate renewal in a multi-actor environment?’ Specifically, we analyse how key actors describe and explain how public housing renewal ‘works’ and the learning processes that shape and reinforce actors’ understanding and beliefs, framed within an advocacy coalition framework (ACF). The article draws on a series of stakeholder interviews involved in the design and delivery of public housing estate renewal in Australia. The findings highlight how key actors responsible for policy assessment and evolution share key beliefs and understandings relating to process, financing and implementation of renewal programmes. These beliefs are collectively reinforced and shared through a series of learning processes that, while enabling incremental policy evolution, remain nested within a hierarchy of beliefs that inhibit significant policy innovation or change.