Political Action, Error and Failure: The Epistemological Limits of Complexity

The trend in government and public policy towards evidence-based policy making has recently been the subject of criticism from authors such as Ian Sanderson who argue that the insights of complexity theory undermine the claims of evidence that these forms of policy design advocate. While taking on board the primary claim of this critique, this article examines the contribution of complexity theory in more detail to suggest that the epistemological obstacles that complexity science identifies also challenge the kind of pragmatic, deliberative model that Sanderson prefers. Instead, it examines the work of Michael Freeden on failure and Michel Foucault on error to demonstrate the ways in which approaches that are less wedded to epistemological certainty can enable policy makers to think more creatively about the complex terrain they must navigate and develop more innovative and less risk-averse forms of political action.

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External Validity and Policy Adaptation: From Impact Evaluation to Policy Design

The World Bank Research Observer ◽

10.1093/wbro/lky010 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 35 (2) ◽

pp. 158-191 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Martin J Williams

Keyword(s):

External Validity ◽

Impact Evaluation ◽

Policy Making ◽

Policy Design ◽

Theory Of Change ◽

Local Context ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Policy Adaptation ◽

Main Challenge

Abstract With the growing number of impact evaluations worldwide, the question of how to apply this evidence in policy making processes has arguably become the main challenge for evidence-based policy making. How can policy makers predict whether a policy will have the same impact in their context as it did elsewhere, and how should this influence the policy’s design and implementation? This paper suggests that failures of external validity (both in transporting and scaling up policy) can be understood as arising from an interaction between a policy’s theory of change and a dimension of the context in which it is being implemented. The paper surveys existing approaches to analyzing external validity, and suggests that there has been more focus on the generalizability of impact evaluation results than on the applicability of evidence to specific contexts. To help fill this gap, the study develops a method of “mechanism mapping” that maps a policy’s theory of change against salient contextual assumptions to identify external validity problems and suggest appropriate policy adaptations. In deciding whether and how to adapt a policy, there is a fundamental informational trade-off between the strength of evidence on the policy from other contexts and the policy maker’s information about the local context.

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Deliberative Research for Deliberative Policy Making: Creating and Recreating Evidence in Transport Policy

Social Policy and Society ◽

10.1017/s1474746411000212 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

pp. 459-470 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Lesley Murray

Keyword(s):

Social Policy ◽

Everyday Life ◽

Policy Making ◽

Transport Policy ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Visual Methods ◽

Research Utilisation ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Policy Responses ◽

Interpretative Research

Despite promotion of evidence-based policy responses, there remains a knowledge gap between policy-makers and academia particularly in transport policy making, which is steeped in positivist traditions. A number of social policy academics have conceptualised research utilisation in relation to particular elements of social policy, but less attention has been paid to the integration of deliberative and interpretative research into transport policy. This article explores this through a study of the journey to school that used mobile and visual methods in an in-depth exploration of this element of everyday life.

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Urban Unemployment in Africa

The Journal of Modern African Studies ◽

10.1017/s0022278x00022126 ◽

1972 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 109-112 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Rita Cruise O'Brien

Keyword(s):

Great Risk ◽

Policy Making ◽

Recent Literature ◽

Conventional Wisdom ◽

Development Studies ◽

Policy Makers ◽

International Conference ◽

Urban Unemployment ◽

The Subject ◽

The University

The Institute of Development Studies organised an international conference on this topic at the University of Sussex, Brighton, from 12 to 16 September 1971. A background paper prepared by the convenors, Richard Jolly and Rita Cruise O'Brien, outlined the purpose as follows:Urban unemployment in Africa is a theme on which much has been written in recent years but which is still ‘in fashion’ and of considerable importance to a broad range of scholars and policy makers…there is a great risk of dissipating one's efforts over that whole field. In planning this conference, we have tried therefore to be guided by three dominant principles: (a) to restrict the topics for discussion so as to focus on what seem to us important issues, on which further understanding could be generated by a bout of concentrated thought, analysis of data and discussion; (b) to invite a limited number of people engaged in current research or involved on the spot with investigation or policy-making; (c) to request authors of papers to start at what might be called the current conventional wisdom among specialists and to build their analysis from there… It will be assumed that persons attending the conference are generally in touch with recent literature on the subject.

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Why policy needs history (and historians)

Health Economics Policy and Law ◽

10.1017/s1744133117000433 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 13 (3-4) ◽

pp. 369-381 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Virginia Berridge

Keyword(s):

Case Studies ◽

Policy Making ◽

Time History ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Direct Relevance ◽

The Past ◽

Evidence Based Policy ◽

Fresh Starts ◽

The Relationship

AbstractPolicy makers like the idea of new initiatives and fresh starts, unencumbered by, even actively overthrowing, what has been done in the past. At the same time, history can be pigeonholed as fusty and antiquarian, dealing with long past events of no relevance to the present. Academic historians are sometimes bound up in their own worlds. The debates central to academe may have little direct relevance to the immediate concerns of policy making. The paper argues that history, as the evidence-based discipline par excellence, is as relevant as other approaches to evidence-based policy making. Case studies can show us the nature of that relevance. How to achieve influence for history also needs discussion. The relationship is not straightforward and will vary according to time and place. History is an interpretative discipline, not just a collection of ‘facts’. The paper discusses how historians work and why it is important for policy makers to engage, not just with history, but with historians as well. Historians too need to think about the value of bringing their analysis into policy.

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Indicators as a Tool for Strengthened Monitoring

10.1093/oso/9780192843371.003.0004 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 108-122

Author(s):

Emma Lantschner

Keyword(s):

Life Cycle ◽

Policy Making ◽

The Political ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Political Dialogue ◽

Outcome Indicators ◽

State Institutions ◽

Law And Policy ◽

Process And Outcome

Chapter 3 is dedicated to a discussion of the concept of indicators, since the use of such an instrument is not uncontroversial. To address critics of the concept, the chapter analyses not only the purposes for which indicators can be used and their related advantages, but also discusses the limitations and pitfalls connected with their use. This chapter also introduces the division into structural, process, and outcome indicators that measure the progress of implementation in different phases of the life cycle of a norm. It further looks at the use that is made (or not made) of indicators in monitoring procedures carried out by the Commission in the pre-accession phase to show that, to date, the concept has been used rather inconsistently. On the basis of the foregoing, it develops criteria for the development of indicators in the area of equality and non-discrimination. The main purpose of these indicators is to support consistent monitoring of the transposition and implementation of the EU non-discrimination acquis. They can, however, also be used as a tool in the political dialogue between the European Commission, civil society actors, and state institutions, as well as by policy makers to analyse the situation in view of evidence-based law and policy making.

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Evidence, Inference and Enquiry

10.5871/bacad/9780197264843.001.0001 ◽

2011 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Keyword(s):

Policy Making ◽

Research Programme ◽

Weapons Of Mass Destruction ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Mass Destruction ◽

Health History ◽

University College London ◽

The Subject ◽

Evidence For Policy ◽

Based Medicine

Evidence — its nature and interpretation — is the key to many topical debates and concerns such as global warming, evolution, the search for weapons of mass destruction, DNA profiling, and evidence-based medicine. In 2004, University College London launched a cross-disciplinary research programme ‘Evidence, Inference and Enquiry’ to explore the question: ‘Can there be an integrated multidisciplinary science of evidence?’ While this question was hotly contested and no clear final consensus emerged, much was learned on the journey. This book, based on the closing conference of the programme held at the British Academy in December 2007, illustrates the complexity of the subject, with seventeen chapters written from a diversity of perspectives including Archaeology, Computer Science, Economics, Education, Health, History, Law, Psychology, Philosophy, and Statistics. General issues covered include principles and systems for handling complex evidence, evidence for policy-making, and human evidence-processing, as well as the very possibility of systematising the study of evidence.

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Uncertainty in science and its role in climate policy

Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences ◽

10.1098/rsta.2011.0149 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 369 (1956) ◽

pp. 4818-4841 ◽

Cited By ~ 59

Author(s):

Leonard A. Smith ◽

Nicholas Stern

Keyword(s):

Climate Policy ◽

Policy Making ◽

Policy Design ◽

Scientific Work ◽

Causal Chain ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Sound Policy ◽

Philosophical Questions ◽

Is Value ◽

Design Guidance

Policy-making is usually about risk management. Thus, the handling of uncertainty in science is central to its support of sound policy-making. There is value in scientists engaging in a deep conversation with policy-makers and others, not merely ‘delivering’ results or analyses and then playing no further role. Communicating the policy relevance of different varieties of uncertainty, including imprecision, ambiguity, intractability and indeterminism, is an important part of this conversation. Uncertainty is handled better when scientists engage with policy-makers. Climate policy aims both to alter future risks (particularly via mitigation) and to take account of and respond to relevant remaining risks (via adaptation) in the complex causal chain that begins and ends with individuals. Policy-making profits from learning how to shift the distribution of risks towards less dangerous impacts, even if the probability of events remains uncertain. Immediate value lies not only in communicating how risks may change with time and how those risks may be changed by action, but also in projecting how our understanding of those risks may improve with time (via science) and how our ability to influence them may advance (via technology and policy design). Guidance on the most urgent places to gather information and realistic estimates of when to expect more informative answers is of immediate value, as are plausible estimates of the risk of delaying action. Risk assessment requires grappling with probability and ambiguity (uncertainty in the Knightian sense) and assessing the ethical, logical, philosophical and economic underpinnings of whether a target of ‘50 per cent chance of remaining under +2 ° C' is either ‘right’ or ‘safe’. How do we better stimulate advances in the difficult analytical and philosophical questions while maintaining foundational scientific work advancing our understanding of the phenomena? And provide immediate help with decisions that must be made now?

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INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN THEIR EXISTENCE OF IN EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY MAKING BY GOVERNMENTS

International Journal of Advanced Research ◽

10.21474/ijar01/12978 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (5) ◽

pp. 1344-1348

Author(s):

Revency Vania Rugebregt ◽

M.J. Saptenno ◽

J. Tjiptabudy

Keyword(s):

Indigenous People ◽

Indigenous Peoples ◽

Policy Making ◽

Research Method ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Vulnerable Group ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Remote Areas ◽

Evidence Based Policy ◽

Laws And Regulations

Indigenous Peoples are a problem that is relatively unknown to the wider community because they are located in remote areas, and only certain areas have Indigenous Peoples problems. They are a very vulnerable group in our society and in the country in general. This happens because they lack access to development and even their rights tend to be neglected. Apart from that, the alignment of the constitution with them in the laws and regulations is not in line with the practice in the field. This research uses the normative research method where the conceptual and statutory approaches are used, but also the legal materials that are obtained in the field will also be input in this research. It is hoped that this research can contribute ideas to policy makers so that it becomes a recommendation for making policies based on conditions in the field or evidence (evidence-based policies).

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The Data Shake: An Opportunity for Experiment-Driven Policy Making

The Data Shake - SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-63693-7_1 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 3-18

Author(s):

Grazia Concilio ◽

Paola Pucci

Keyword(s):

Data Collection ◽

Critical Review ◽

Policy Making ◽

Policy Design ◽

Data Availability ◽

Collection Management ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Policy Making Process ◽

Urban Problems ◽

Design Experiments

AbstractThe wider availability of data and the growing technological advancements in data collection, management, and analysis introduce unprecedented opportunities, as well as complexity in policy making. This condition questions the very basis of the policy making process towards new interpretative models. Growing data availability, in fact, increasingly affects the way we analyse urban problems and make decisions for cities: data are a promising resource for more effective decisions, as well as for better interacting with the context where decisions are implemented. By dealing with the operative implications in the use of a growing amount of available data in policy making processes, this contribution starts discussing the chance offered by data in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a planning policy, with a critical review of the evidence-based policy making approaches; then it introduces the relevance of data in the policy design experiments and the conditions for its uses.

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Digital Transformations in Planning: An Australian Context

10.31235/osf.io/5k4sz ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Matthew Kok Ming Ng ◽

Christopher Pettit

Keyword(s):

Development Policy ◽

Policy Making ◽

Data Analytics ◽

Data Repository ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Data Governance ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Governance Model ◽

Planning Institute ◽

Urban Problems

Australia is currently undergoing sweeping changes in transforming and digitizing its planning and development sectors. However, numerous challenges still exist in consolidating and making accessible essential data in the country to effect evidence-based development policy-making. This has been argued to have tangible consequences in formulating solutions to urban problems, such as housing delivery, and driving new urban innovations that are data-focused. In this chapter, we discuss a new urban data governance model in the context of the development of a novel single housing data and analytics platform, which has been formulated based on Australia’s current issues on data disparity, ownership, and interoperability. This platform, the Australian Housing Data Analytics Platform, seeks provide researchers with an integrated data repository and transparent analytical capabilities that hopes to drive collaboration, public participation, and data democratization across the country. In line with PlanTech principles developed through the Australian Planning Institute, this chapter describes how data in Australia can be made as a public good and integral commodity for policy-makers for the better planning for our cities.

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