The investment approach to public service provision

The investment approach to public service provision is now receiving considerable attention worldwide. By promoting data‐intensive assessments of baseline conditions and how government action can improve on them, the approach holds the potential to transform policy development, service implementation, and program evaluation. Recently, variations on the investment approach have been applied in Australia to explore the effectiveness of specific programs in employment training, criminal justice, and infrastructure development. This article reviews the investment approach, presents a Public Investment Checklist to guide such work, and discusses three examples. It concludes by considering the implications of investment thinking for the work of policy designers and public managers

Strengthening policy capability: New Zealand's Policy Project

Policy practitioners apply tools and frameworks to policy chal- lenges in order to improve social, economic, and environmental outcomes. Could such tools and frameworks be applied to improve the quality of policy design itself? In 2014, prompted by evidence of widespread inconsistency in the quality of policy advice being produced across agencies, the New Zealand Government launched the Policy Project. It deployed policy ana- lytic tools and frameworks to investigate current practice in policy design to improve the quality of policy advice across the whole of government. Through collaborative methods, the Policy Project identified and codified what quality policy advice looks like and the skills and processes needed to produce it. We review the con- text and creation of the Policy Project, its contributions, evidence of its impacts, and prospects for its replication across other public sectors