Public policies as investments

Many governments around the world are currently experiencing financial stress. Due to changed economic circumstances, tax revenues have fallen while pressures on expenditures have increased. In response, governments have been engaging in more deficit spending. Longer term, however, deficits must be eliminated and ways must be found to run surpluses so that government debt can be sustainably managed. Despite improved government abilities to manage their financial position in the face of changing economic circumstances, we can expect periods of fiscal stress to recur from time to time. During these periods, governments inevitably look for ways to reduce their expenditures. How should spending be cut? This is what we know: Usually spending cuts are imposed across the board. Agency staff members are expected to exercise discretion in determining how to meet savings targets. In practice, this can mean imposing expenditure cuts uniformly across a range of programs. Sometimes, particular programs are targeted and eliminated because they do not enjoy strong political support. Others – like professional development programs for staff members – are viewed as ‘nice to have’ but as ‘luxuries’. Spending for them is cut with the intention that, when the fiscal situation improves, spending on them will begin again. In 2010 I was appointed by the New Zealand Government to chair a taskforce on early childhood education. From November 2010 through to April 2011, I worked with a group of eight other experts to review the current situation in that sector and suggest future policy directions. There was an occasion when I met with Treasury officials to discuss our work. By that point, I was familiar enough with the evidence base to know that funding high-quality, effectively-targeted early childhood education programs was one of the best investments that governments could make. In the conversation with Treasury officials, I was briefed on the difficult fiscal situation the government faced. I was reminded that the taskforce was to consider ways to improve outcomes without increasing spending. And it was suggested to me that the Treasury viewed early childhood education as an area where spending had been increasing too fast and where there appeared to be a lot of room for making cuts. My response was to ask about the logic underlying budgetary decision-making in the Treasury. It became clear from that conversation that the ‘logic’ involved looking to make cuts wherever it was politically viable. When I asked about comparison of marginal returns on expenditures, I was met with quizzical stares. Ultimately, the taskforce I chaired argued strongly for improved targeting in early childhood education spending, and for promoting of higher quality service provision. We also argued that this area should be made a top expenditure priority for government spending and that, as more funding became available, increased expenditure in the area would be merited. This paper is an initial step in my effort to build on and broaden the logic that led me to believe the New Zealand Government should give high priority to funding high-quality, effectively-targeted early childhood education programs. Currently, I am working to amass existing evidence about the positive returns that societies can enjoy when governments make well-chosen public policy investments across many areas, not just education. I intend to show that effective use of evidence is essential to the making of good public policy choices, but that too often such evidence is ignored. Further, I intend to establish the foundations for an on-going research agenda that will ultimately promote more theory- driven, evidence-based decision-making in government than is presently observed. This paper has one key message. Public policy choices should be informed by investment analysis. Often, they are not. But investment models are starting to be used more systematically to guide government decision-making (see, e.g., Aos et al 2011). Consequently, an opportunity now exists for extending the logic of investment decision-making to most government spending choices

Policy advice and the pursuit of public value

High-quality policy advice is an essential component of effective modern government. At its best, policy advice draws on the appropriate analysis of sound evidence to indicate directions for government action. At a more mundane level, policy advice in the form of situational analysis is required by Cabinet ministers to keep them abreast of developments within the purview of their respective portfolios. When informed by programme evaluation, policy advice can tell us whether current policies are delivering the valued outcomes that were anticipated when those policies were first adopted. &nbsp

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

How state governments talk about the covid-19 pandemic helps them tackle it.

Much of the responsibility for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic in the US has fallen on states and their governments. Michael Mintrom and Ruby O’Connor write that the stories governors have told their citizens about their state’s COVID-19 policies have been incredibly important. They argue that in order to best aid the acceptance of often controversial policies, policymakers should strive to create consistent messages, crafted to local conditions and that align talk with action

Integrating design thinking into policymaking processes offers great value for citizens and government

Design thinking offers a powerful way to narrow the gap between what governments do and what citizens expect from government. Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens explain how elements of design thinking, having already been successfully applied in social sciences research, are now being combined to produce powerful insights into citizen actions and their interactions with governments, and improve policymaking processes

Design Thinking in Policymaking Processes: Opportunities and Challenges

Design thinking has the potential to improve problem definition and mechanism design in policymaking processes. By promoting greater understanding of how citizens experience government services, design thinking can support public managers who desire to enhance public value. In Australia, as elsewhere, design thinking currently remains separated from mainstream policymaking efforts. This article clarifies the essence of design thinking and its applicability to policy development. Five design thinking strategies are discussed, all of which have lengthy histories as social science methodologies. They are (1) environmental scanning, (2) participant observation, (3) open-to-learning conversations, (4) mapping, and (5) sensemaking. Recent examples from Australia and New Zealand are used to illustrate how these strategies have been incorporated into policymaking efforts. The article concludes by considering how design thinking might be more broadly applied in policymaking, and the training and resourcing requirements that would entail

Comparing the policy narratives of Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson during the Covid-19 pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has required citizens to adhere to strict restrictions to help tackle infection rates. Drawing on a new study, Michael Mintrom, Maria Rost Rublee, Matteo Bonotti and Steven T. Zech compare the effectiveness of the policy narratives used by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to encourage citizens to follow their advice

Re-visiting Meltsner: Policy Advice Systems and the Multi-Dimensional Nature of Professional Policy Analysis

10.2139/ssrn.15462511-2

Policy Entrepreneurship by International Bureaucracies: The Evolution of Public Information in UN Peacekeeping

The UN Secretariat’s role in the expansion of peacekeeping after the cold war is debated. Different theoretical accounts offer competing interpretations: principal–agent models and sociological institutionalism tend to emphasize the Secretariat’s risk-averse behaviour; organizational learning scholarship and international political sociology find evidence of the Secretariat’s activism; constructivism analyses instances of both. I argue that the UN Secretariat can be both enthusiastic and cautious about new tasks depending on the circumstances and the issue area. For example, UN officials have been the driving force behind the development of public information campaigns by peacekeeping missions aimed at the local population. During the cold war, it was not regarded as necessary for UN missions to communicate with the public in the area of operation: their interlocutors were parties to the conflict and the diplomatic community. With the deployment of the first multidimensional missions in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, UN staff realized the need to explain the organization’s role to the local population and provide information about UN-supported elections. In promoting this innovation, they played the role of policy entrepreneurs. The institutionalization of this innovation, however, was not an automatic process and required continuous advocacy by UN information staff

The motivations for the adoption of management innovation by local governments and its performance effects

This article analyses the economic, political and institutional antecedents and performance effects of the adoption of shared Senior Management Teams (SMTs) – a management innovation (MI) that occurs when a team of senior managers oversees two or more public organizations. Findings from statistical analysis of 201 English local governments and interviews with organizational leaders reveal that shared SMTs are adopted to develop organisational capacity in resource‐challenged, politically risk‐averse governments, and in response to coercive and mimetic institutional pressures. Importantly, sharing SMTs may reduce rather than enhance efficiency and effectiveness due to redundancy costs and the political transaction costs associated with diverting resources away from a high‐performing partner to support their lower‐performing counterpart