Evidence for Public Policy Design

How to Learn from Best Practice

P. Coletti

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349450701, 9781137291011
• eBook ISBN: 9781137291028
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Learning from the successes and failures of others is a necessity in the field of public sector innovation. This book develops guidelines for policymakers, practitioners and policy analysts to understand what drives policy success and to transfer innovations from a source case to a target case with a view to assisting effective policy design.

1

The Diffusion of Best Practices in the Public Sector

Abstract: Policy innovations in the public sector are very common. It is rather usual to hear about the adoption of what are considered by international organizations as “best practices” without necessarily carrying out an accurate analysis. But how can one learn? This chapter will briefly outline the literature on policy diffusion and learning, the Evidence Based Policy and the extrapolation approach to feed the findings of the work and to widen the horizon of recent literature.

Key words: innovations in the public sector, dissemination of policy innovations, learning processes, best practices, policy transfer, policy diffusion, social mechanisms, Evidence Based Policy, extrapolation approach, replication

Coletti, Paola. Evidence for Public Policy Design: How to Learn from Best Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137291028.

1 Policy innovations in the public sector

The concept of State has been affected by many changes over the years (for example, the implementation of information and communication technology (ICT), the private sector performance approaches, the measurement of public sector productivity, the inclusion of private actors) and a growing research body has taken interest in the public sector reform. The evolution of the debate on public sector reform has been analysed from various perspectives and “labelled” in different ways (New Public Management, Reinventing Government, Administrative Reform, Citizen-Centred Government and so on). Forgetting the terminology itself for a moment, literature stresses the evolution of institutional organizations, the application of private sector models to the public sector and the emphasis on government performances. Kettl (2005) calls this evolution a “global public management revolution”. Thus, ideas and innovations originating from the private sector promote a ground-breaking attitude for the public sector where stimulating changes do not seem straightforward. The modernization within the public sector is slowed down by public officials who are frightened of frequent innovation failures and by being the object of blame for malfunction (Altshuster,1997); as Behn (1997) stresses, public administration is less inclined to improve the quality of services provided to citizens because of low performance-related pressure.

Opposed to the stereotypical bureaucrat adverse to change, one of the drivers for innovation alludes to “entrepreneurial public servants” that may produce positive changes at any governmental level.

These considerations generate a watershed between “innovation optimists” (Pollit and Bouckaert, 2000) and “innovation skeptics”. While the first group considers every small improvement as an important source of knowledge for practitioners, the so called sceptics refuse to consider the public management practices, drawn from the private sector, suitable for the public realm.

Examining the large debate in literature, a clarification of the word “innovation” has to be borrowed by Walker (1969) who refers to a program or policy adopted for the first time by a country, no matter how old the program may be or how many other States adopted it. An original innovation produced by a State follows a hypothetic and time-consuming procedure: defining the problem to be addressed, inventing a solution, experimenting a solution and implementing it. As occurring problems need to quickly find solutions, the natural circulation of ready-to-apply innovations between countries has replaced procedures for inventing an innovative policy or program. Furthermore, relating to the theories about learning from vicarious experiences has triggered other phenomena such as policy diffusion, transfer, propagation and replication. To be more precise, the conceptual distinction between these terms – theorized by Behn (2008) – may be alleged to solve the confusion existing in literature and define how it is possible to learn from others:

diffusion: a hidden, spontaneous, non-intentional process, whereby people find out about the innovation and decide whether it is worth experimenting (defined as the “somehow-people-will-learn-how-to-get-better approach”);

transfer: informal exchange of ideas and practices among actors – often a network of peers and colleagues working in the same field but within different organizations (defined as the “friends-will-tell-friends-about-how-they-are-getting-better approach”);

propagation: a concerted endeavour to create a conscious educational strategy devoted to transfer the innovation to other people (defined as the “we-ought-to-help-people-learn-how-to-get-better approach”);

replication: efforts exerted by an organization to actively research successful ideas, policies, programs or practices that can apply to improve a program (defined as the “we-want-to-learn-from-others-who-know-how-to-get-better approach”).

The identification of an innovation to transfer may come from monitoring other countries (the so-called bandwagon effect; Rosenkopf and Abrahamson, 1999) and referring to their experience because of their reputation as innovators.

Basically, the adoption of innovations, previously developed in other contexts, is neither an easy nor a casual process. Ideas and practices are transferred through formal and informal networks of institutions or actors who are in favour of their dissemination (Rogers, 1995). In particular, this process seems to be driven by uncertainty; governments that face difficulties in the decision-making process are inclined to draw inspiration from how other countries tackled similar problems and borrow easy, ready and inexpensive innovations to be adopted (Meseguer, 2005).

2 Policy diffusion and learning

Decision makers are frequently used to explore vicarious experiences that are rapidly pinched from an innovator country and easily transferred to another context. In the age of globalization, the cross-national dissemination of administrative practices is one of the key factors boosting innovation in public sector; in particular, the policy diffusion phenomenon is fuelled thanks to the development of information technology, which makes data more available.

Intuitively, the common roots of the policy diffusion phenomenon refer to the literature on policy learning, whereas the importance of learning from one domain evolves over the years and involves policies, programs and, generally speaking, practices experienced within another context located elsewhere.

Focussing on policy transfer literature, classic studies on policy learning take interest in understanding the causal mechanism and, generally, the transfer of a policy from one country to another – which is what some call “lesson drawing” (Rose, 1991; 1993; 2004). The prescriptive approach developed by Rose states that policy makers draw lessons from their counterparts in other domains coping with similar problems; the “agents of learning” are generally civil servants seeking to improve programs by using knowledge and carefully paying attention to the innovation transfer process. Even though this rational–synoptic approach has some limits, the attention paid to the policy formulation phase and practical knowledge paves the way for the policy transfer analysis mingled with studies on policy design that are carefully inquired by Schneider and Ingram (1988); thus far, their notion of “systematically pinching ideas” refers to the suggestion addressed to policy designers to adopt a more formal and rational selection process when policy ideas are transferred from other contexts, by comparing features of the different policy designs.

Building on these works, the Dolowitz and Marsh studies (1996; 2000) have further expanded the notion of policy transfer incorporating both the descriptive and the prescriptive dimension of what one should learn from the experience of others and classifying different types of transfer.

Naturally, none of these distinctions is immutable, and some limits of policy transfer could be stressed; the descriptive approach proposed by the lesson drawing theory implies the risk of an oversimplification of the policy game and does not provide enough elements to explain policy success or failure (James and Lodge, 2003).

Without pausing here to reflect upon the controversies of the policy transfer approaches, some key concepts may be easily outlined. Learning from vicarious experiences underpins two perceived shortcomings: on one hand, the above mentioned discussion about epistemic problems leads to the consideration that decision makers are inclined to learn from abroad since policy problems required an inexpensive and quick solution. On the other hand, human beings seek for “natural competitor” experiences to emulate the best performer in a specified policy innovation achieving the same results, or even better, if compared to the source case; particular emphasis is addressed to pick from reassuring and familiar realities, like countries with a similar institutional context (Radaelli, 2000), or with the same or a slightly better degree of maturity in the public policy innovation sector.

3 The “factory” of best practices

Without doubt, the timeline for making decisions is scarce and policy makers want solutions that are already prepared and quick to apply. This inclination to learn from others has produced many examples of best practices to be adopted. Thus, the debate on the diffusion of best practices able to solve policy problems has grown at a much slower pace than the “factory” of best practices, responsible for detecting – often without a proper analysis – and transferring successful innovations from source cases to different contexts (the so-called target cases). The phenomenon of policy innovations and their schizophrenic diffusion have been favoured by the organization of recurrent international seminars, the explosion in the availability of data through the diffusion of reports and the regular coordination meetings among States both at the European and international institution level. International organizations are absorbed, to a significant extent, by the work of gathering and disseminating countries’ practices to suggest member States’ policy prescriptions on how to perform better in certain fields. As a matter of fact, the role of the “agents of learning” (Stone, 1999) – represented by international organizations, think tanks, transnational corporations, non-governmental institutions and consultant groups – encourages the exchange of ideas for public policy innovations. They may offer advice based on the so-called best practices and, implicitly, seek to influence the government in their policies (Davies et al., 2000). Truthfully, the growing importance of global networks, think tanks, foundations, perceived as epistemic communities spreading around policy knowledge, may be associated to the renewed role of the European Union as a key actor in innovation processes (Radaelli, 2000). Several programs have been launched at the European level to identify best practices within the public administration, an industrious “factory” collecting innovations from European countries and sponsored above all by the European Commission (Melloni, 2012).

Likewise, the natural inclination to look at the experience of others influences the research programs of American centres of excellence: for example, the Council for Excellence in Government, the Ford Foundation and Kennedy School Innovations in American Government, were created in the United States for assessing the quality of public sector innovations, to improve government performances and share best practices.

Judging by the evidence drawn from public sector experiences of the past decade, it seems easier to transfer administrative reforms rather than reforms in substantive policies; this could be due to the fact that administrative reforms do not interfere with the core policy goals that could even concern delicate or ideological issues. Therefore, the special interests involved in the policy might stop any reform tackling core issues whereas the public administration reforms are easy to be diffused without conflict.

Nevertheless, low-cost and easy solutions are so attractive that they lead to the proliferation of best practices associated to the risk of “being hostage to the best practices tradition” (Lynn 1996; Overman and Boyd 1994).

Unexpectedly, it suddenly seems clear that innovations are sometimes not worth mentioning, and can be unreliable or unstable. Critiques stirring up against best practices stress some points: for example, a troublesome obstacle is due to the different contexts of each target case in which innovations may be implemented; in general, the analysis does not consider that local contexts involve different actors and interests, limited local resources and peculiar constraints that could make the implementation of the innovation difficult.

What could be highlighted is that best practice analysis tends to exclusively focus on successful experiences, rejecting applications that led to failures. Lynn (1996) argues that the best practices research fails when it comes to select the correct dependent variable: it is in fact inconceivable that one can simply fish out positive experiences to understand to what extent success is due to similar innovations. Another important aspect refers to what the drivers of success are for a specific practice and what problem is addressed by an innovation. Truly, a careful analysis of the content of the practice is often left aside.

Last but not least, innovations might not objectively be a best practice as Bardach (1998; 2008) stresses; in fact, the adjective “best” implies that a practice should be better than many others, and therefore rare. The problem is that the massive “fabrication” of best practices and consequent easy-to-follow examples, goes in the opposite direction. The ordinary channels for the dissemination of best practices do not rigorously check the soundness of these innovations: in most cases, the selection of the best practices was underestimated and caused many countries to implement a practice too quickly without having enough understanding about their reliability. Bardach (1998) prefers to call them “smart practices” since the goal is to make the most of hidden opportunities and create outputs on cheap showing policy makers’ ability to obtain something in exchange of little or nothing at all.

Though policy solutions are potentially infinite, policy makers’ choices are narrow-minded just like learning processes from other experiences are inadequate.

This work aims to focus on a crucial aspect involving the blurred relationship between knowledge and power in a decision-making process. Particularly, this issue will be investigated in relation with the policy makers and practitioners’ ability to “learn how to learn”. One of the reasons alludes to the decision makers’ lack of information; thus far, the ability to learn seems to be limited and communication often requires an oversimplification of details, which leads to an incorrect understanding of the innovation framework itself. In addition, the ability to adequately learn, analyse and transfer innovation depends on the limits of rationality (Levinthal and March, 1993) and policy advisers do not seem to be able to provide policy makers with adequate and detailed advice.

Hence, what can they learn?

Over the past few years, the popular Evidence Based Policy approach (developed by Tony Blair’s administration to launch government reform and modernization) debates this point referring to the evidence of what works (Cabinet Office, 1999).

What the Evidence Based Policy largely overlooked is the need for integration and the balance between the conceptual statement of learning from abroad and the empirical step of transferring to another country. In this sense, the use of evidence has become central in studying policy diffusion and Evidence Based Policy literature is strongly oriented to provide systematic and high-quality research to support policy makers and practitioners in several policy domains. Evidence will ensure that policy making integrates expert knowledge, existing statistics, stakeholder consult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Diffusion of Best Practices in the Public Sector
• 2  The Diffusion of the Standard Cost Model
• 3  The Standard Cost Model in the Netherlands
• 4  The Transfer of the Standard Cost Model in Denmark
• 5  What Emerges from the Case Studies?
• Conclusion
• Appendix: How to Learn from Vicarious Experience
• Bibliography
• Index