General Vs particular in policy making

Apurva Bamezai and MR Sharan have an excellent follow-up to Jean Dreze's brilliant articulation of the limitations of economists to offer good policy advice.

They draw attention to the limitations of quantitative techniques in studying particular effects (in specific localities or on specific categories of population), as opposed to general (or aggregate and average) effects, which are important to understand distributional consequences. Similarly, it is not much useful to study mechanisms of impact. They argue that centralised policy making privileges evidence on average or general effects. They write,

Insofar as we have centralised policymaking and an over-burdened policy apparatus, the ‘general’ will be privileged over the ‘particular’ and development economists will continue to generate the kind of evidence that influences policy. However, this does not preclude the need for much greater State engagement with a wider set of researchers, cutting across disciplines in social sciences. This is particularly true for researching impact of policies on poor, vulnerable, and marginalised groups. Furthermore, policy design affects different groups differently and it is imperative that the State listens more (thereby also diversifying its evidence base) to citizens, civil society groups, social movements, and NGOs. Plugging gaps in policy design and implementation cannot be just a product of technocratic thinking and economic efficiency, especially in a democracy.

Agree. But there is more to this than these limitations. 

There is a fundamental difference between policy making and policy implementation. While policy is made in the aggregate or at the general level, successful policy implementation (in a diverse country) demands attention to the specific context and its particular details. This, in turn, demands that policy be made by according adequate flexibility in implementation. In simple terms, since implementation has to be tailored to fit the context, policy has to be offer the greatest flexibility consistent with an acceptable degree of control over the implementation and the realisation of objectives. 

But the point about implementation flexibility raises the practical issue of state capacity. Customisation to meet contextual requirements, howsoever marginal, demands significant quality of engagement by officials at that level. Further, it also requires credible enough monitoring metrics and system for officials at various higher levels. Unfortunately, all these are difficult to realise in the short-run, maybe even the medium-term of a particular implementation. In its absence, tinkering with implementation design is more likely to leave us worse off than with an one-size-fits-all implementation.

This is the Catch 22 situation that policy makers face.