Three thoughts on public policy

This is a distillation of several posts in this blog on development and public policy. 

The narrative often races far ahead of the reality. This creates several problems apart from adversely impacting the realisation of outcomes. Public issues are especially prone to this disease. 

It's therefore required to recalibrate the narrative. In that spirit, this post will highlight three dominant trends in public policy that I believe have become detrimental to the realisation of policy objectives and to public interest. 

They are the pervasive use of management consultants to design policies and monitor their implementation, the application of technology solutions to solve intractable policy challenges, and the adoption of evidence-based policy approaches to solve policy failures. 

1. The use of management consultants in policy and program design and their implementation:

Policy makers substitute their own officials for management consultants to appraise projects/programs, prepare Notes, documents, and presentations. Most often these management consultants have limited understanding of the domain and the context, both critical for effective decision-making. What emerges from such consulting are logically appealing but half-baked ideas, superficial prescriptions, and often distortionary and conflicts-ridden policies. 

An appropriate recalibration would be to junk the approach of indiscriminate hiring consultants for everything and instead restrict their use for purposes as outlined in this post. They should not be used for formulation of policies (except in the support tasks of collecting information and processing them), delivery of statutory services, and any task that's strategically important. Instead, they should be used only for non-strategic purposes. 

2. The embrace of the mantra of evidence-based policy making that's inclined to particular kinds of evidences.

Edward Deming, the American engineer and management consultant, famously said, "In God we trust, all others must bring data." This has come to become a cardinal principle of modern management theories. New public management and the economicisation of public policy has led to the extrapolation of this principle to public policy formulation. 

As I have blogged earlier, this has serious problems. Many public issues are wicked problems and the remaining are atleast complex problems, and these cannot be diagnosed, explained, and resolved primarily using generalised theories and techniques that rely on data. There are far too many counterfactuals and contextual issues that make modelling and quantitative estimation impractical and impossible. 

An appropriate recalibration would be to subordinate quantitative evidence to good judgement and wisdom. Data and empirical evidence is important, but only as one of several inputs. The scope of evidence should be expanded to include ethnographies, qualitative aspects, cross-disciplinary (outside of economics) insights etc. The policy maker should be able to use all these different evidence inputs, draw on experiential wisdom, and then exercise personal judgment to make a determination on the causes and prescriptions. The answers that emerge from this combinatorial exercise should prevail over purely evidence-based policies. 

3. The adoption of technology as a solution to persistent public policy challenges. 

For policy makers and politicians struggling with the frustrations of solving intractable problems that are also exacerbated by acute state capability deficiencies, technology solutions are convenient crutch. Apart from offering the hope of a solution within a defined time, they also sync with the dominant narrative of the time that sees technology as a solution to all the world's problems. Political economy problems, state capability deficiencies, and poor governance get glossed over. Technology comes to be seen as almost a magic pill. At the least, once technology is adopted the associated work is seen as marginal and manageable (think Edtech, where the struggle has been to get the technology solution right and little has focused on equipping the teacher to effectively utilise the technology solution). 

From this perspective technology is most often a deeply damaging distraction. It induces complacency and false comfort among all stakeholders. It allows stakeholders from having to face up to the reality and undertake the struggles required to address the problems. It comes in the way of the hard toil required to address the underlying concerns. 

A recalibration would necessitate the policy maker taking a more sceptical view of technology solutions and being selective about the choice of the right kinds of technologies. Even where used, given both the low baseline and the state capability and other deficiencies and constraints, the most basic versions of technology are often sufficient. And the technology intervention cannot be a substitute for governance.