scholarly journals No More Than Comfort? A logics approach to the 'grip' of cost-benefit analysis in a New Zealand public policy decision

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Clare Markham
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Public Funding ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Her2 Positive ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Public Policy Decisions

<p>This study explores an apparent paradox: cost-benefit analysis (CBA) requires a series of highly subjective decisions to calculate, yet is employed for its perceived objectivity. The dominant view of CBA in the academic and policy literature is as a neutral technology, offering an objective resolution to difficult resource allocation problems. However, this view has been much challenged, with long-standing and still-unresolved debates on CBA’s technical calculation and methodological approaches, as well as critiques of its underpinning socio-political assumptions and its consequences. Drawing on the literature considering accounting as a form of discourse, this study investigates CBA and its discursive use in the debate between 2006 and 2008 around the public policy decisions regarding New Zealand’s public funding of Herceptin (trastuzumab) for early HER2-positive breast cancer (‘the debate’). The repeated use of cost and CBA in arguments by the participants in this debate was striking, with both those for and those against funding appearing to regard CBA as especially authoritative. This authority – even dominance – of CBA in public policy decision-making has been addressed from several perspectives, but its affective (embodied, emotional, non-cognitive) dimensions remain under-explored. This study addresses that gap through a qualitative documentary analysis employing the post-structural critical discourse-theoretic approach of Glynos and Howarth’s Logics of Critical Explanation (LCE) framework (Glynos, J., & Howarth, D. (2007). Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge). It offers the following contributions: (a) it provides knowledge of how CBA is presented, positioned, contested, and defended in the Herceptin debate; (b) it generates a genealogically-inflected understanding of how these have come about; (c) its offers an explanation for CBA’s ‘grip’ (continued authority despite its difficulties); and (d) it proposes some alternative presentations, positionings, contestations, and defences of CBA.</p>

scholarly journals No More Than Comfort? A logics approach to the 'grip' of cost-benefit analysis in a New Zealand public policy decision

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Clare Markham
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Public Funding ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Her2 Positive ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Public Policy Decisions

<p>This study explores an apparent paradox: cost-benefit analysis (CBA) requires a series of highly subjective decisions to calculate, yet is employed for its perceived objectivity. The dominant view of CBA in the academic and policy literature is as a neutral technology, offering an objective resolution to difficult resource allocation problems. However, this view has been much challenged, with long-standing and still-unresolved debates on CBA’s technical calculation and methodological approaches, as well as critiques of its underpinning socio-political assumptions and its consequences. Drawing on the literature considering accounting as a form of discourse, this study investigates CBA and its discursive use in the debate between 2006 and 2008 around the public policy decisions regarding New Zealand’s public funding of Herceptin (trastuzumab) for early HER2-positive breast cancer (‘the debate’). The repeated use of cost and CBA in arguments by the participants in this debate was striking, with both those for and those against funding appearing to regard CBA as especially authoritative. This authority – even dominance – of CBA in public policy decision-making has been addressed from several perspectives, but its affective (embodied, emotional, non-cognitive) dimensions remain under-explored. This study addresses that gap through a qualitative documentary analysis employing the post-structural critical discourse-theoretic approach of Glynos and Howarth’s Logics of Critical Explanation (LCE) framework (Glynos, J., & Howarth, D. (2007). Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge). It offers the following contributions: (a) it provides knowledge of how CBA is presented, positioned, contested, and defended in the Herceptin debate; (b) it generates a genealogically-inflected understanding of how these have come about; (c) its offers an explanation for CBA’s ‘grip’ (continued authority despite its difficulties); and (d) it proposes some alternative presentations, positionings, contestations, and defences of CBA.</p>

Show Me the Money: Cost-Benefit Analysis in the Work Environment

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Levenstein ◽  
Mary Lee Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Work Environment ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Public Policy Making

During the last several decades, Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) has become a widely used technique in public policy-making. This review examines CBA from perspectives of both advocates and critics; it looks at its theory and practice, its purported advantages and shortcomings in application. It also proposes several ways in which the process can be made more accountable.

scholarly journals A Social Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Vehicle Restriction Policy for Reducing Overtourism in Udo, Korea

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suah Kim ◽  
Namjo Kim
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Net Benefit ◽  
The Public ◽  
Restriction Policy ◽  
The Social

Overtourism has given rise to conflict among various stakeholders. Accordingly, to control overtourism, the public sector has started to implement policies. Recently, Udo off Jeju Island in South Korea has begun experiencing overtourism; to prevent the situation from deteriorating, the public sector implemented a vehicle restriction policy. This study used a cost-benefit analysis framework to assess the social costs and benefits of the public policy to control overtourism in Udo. Through interviews and relevant data and documents, this study classified analysis items related to the policy that could be either a cost or benefit to different stakeholders. The social cost-benefit analysis showed that the net benefit increases, the longer the policy continues, thus ensuring it is adequate and feasible to implement the policy. An effective management public policy for the sustainability of the region’s tourism should always be promoted.

Risk and Governance Part II: Policy in a Complex and Plurally Perceived World

1998 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Thompson ◽  
Steve Rayner ◽  
Steven Ney
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Risk Perception ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Probabilistic Risk Assessment ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Life Years ◽  
Definition Of

OUR CONCLUSION, IN PART I,* WAS THAT THE ABANDONMENT OF THE expert/lay dichotomy as the basis for understanding risk perception, whilst essential, is not going to be easy. We argued that:1) Objectivism (the idea that we can clearly distinguish between what the risks really are and what people variously and erroneously believe them to be) has to give way to constructivism (the idea that risk is inherently subjective: something that we project onto whatever it is that is ‘out there’).2) To impose a single definition of what the problem is, which is what so much of policy analysis and science-for-public-policy does, is to exclude all those who happen not to share that particular way of framing things. Since people are unlikely to support a policy that is aimed at solving what they do not see to be the problem, approaches that insist on singularity (and on single metrics — cost: benefit analysis, for instance, probabilistic risk assessment, qualityadjusted life years and so on) will inevitably be low on consent, surprise-prone, unref lexive, brittle and undemocratic.

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