Prof Kent Weaver talks to ANZSOG about his recent work and new executive workshop

Prof Kent Weaver spoke with ANZSOG about the importance of the policy implementation process and how this will be addressed in his brand new ANZSOG executive workshop, Policy Design and Delivery: Influencing Public Behaviour.

Although your work is well known in academic circles 'Down Under', public servants here don’t know much about you. How would you characterise your applied work that might resonate with public sector professionals in Australia and New Zealand?
Much of my applied work concerns problems that arise in the policy implementation process—everything from poor coordination between agencies and levels of government, to a poor fit between new tasks and the organizational mission and culture of an implementing agency, to failure to provide adequate staff and financial resources, to perverse incentives and other constraints that confront overstretched front-line workers. I believe that many of these potential problems can be identified in advance and prevented or mitigated, avoiding a lot of later implementation headaches for agency managers and their political bosses. But the first step in improving things is developing a clear understanding of the underlying problems.

You were in New Zealand last year. What was that trip for?
I was speaking at a conference that was organized as part of the 2010 Review of Retirement Income Policy in New Zealand. Pensions policy is one of my main areas of substantive policy research, and New Zealand is one of the case study countries in a book I am writing on that topic. I developed a multi-dimensional 'report card' on New Zealand’s retirement income system that sparked a lot of debate among the participants.

Did you pick up any distinctive features about the policy landscape there during your trip?
I am always fascinated when I travel to Australia and New Zealand at how closely policymakers in the two countries follow policies and policy outcomes across the Tasman and draw comparisons between the two. And as a student of individual compliance behavior, I am struck by the high rates of jaywalking in Wellington!

You will be in Australia in August as a guest of ANZSOG and the centrepiece of your visit will be the inaugural version of a new executive workshop. In a nutshell, what is that course about?
The course seeks to develop a deeper and more integrated understanding of the final but most critical stage of policy implementation: how individuals, groups and businesses respond to government policies in ways that advance or conflict with governments’ objectives. It is relevant to every component of government policy, from public health to education, tax policy enforcement, road safety, and criminal justice policy.

It sounds like it’s a course that could be useful to a range of different government people: those who do policy design, those who seek to change public behaviour, and those who regulate or strive to get people and organisations to comply. Will all these groups find the course valuable?
I think that they will all find it useful. The objective of the course is to help policymakers and implementers think systematically about barriers to 'get people to behave' and potential strategies to improve compliance, as well as 'leverage points' that can help governments achieve their objectives while minimizing costs to the budget and impositions on those affected by the policy. Of course, sometimes difficult policy trade-offs must be made, while in other situations the most cost-effective policy strategy is politically unfeasible. And in some cases, the best approach isn’t a marginal patch to improve compliance, but a fundamental rethink of objectives or approach. I hope that this course will help participants think through which of these responses is appropriate.

There has been a growing awareness of the ‘Nudge’ approach to policy design as advocated by Thaler and Sunstein in their famous book. I take it your course will be more complex than advocating this particular approach?
Thaler and Sunstein focus primarily on cognitive barriers that affect how individuals respond to government policies. They then discuss ways that government can tweak policy environments to produce better outcomes. This course will incorporate insights from behavioural economics, but it examines a much broader set of influences on how citizens respond to policy. These include a lack of relevant resources (e.g., income and skills) on the part of policy 'targets', difficulties in monitoring behaviour, poor information about policies, mistrust of government, and peer effects. Moreover, the targets of many public policies are quite heterogeneous. As a result, government may need to think about multiple strategies to reach different groups, and, in a world of scarce resources, think through which groups and which strategies should be prioritised to achieve an acceptable level of compliance.

You will be working with ANZSOG faculty and using mostly Australian and New Zealand cases. Can you tell us a little about the local cases and why you chose them?
Above all, I want to show the underlying common influences that affect how individuals and businesses respond to government policy, even when the eventual behaviours may look quite different. Because senior-level public service managers often need to deal with a diverse set of policies, and may move across multiple ministries over the course of their careers, it is important that they be able to draw these underlying connections. I chose Australia-New Zealand cases that will help to illustrate these commonalities across diverse sectors such as road safety, tobacco control, and mandatory flood evacuations. In most cases we will discuss, there are complex and interacting reasons why individuals and businesses are resistant to 'behaving' the way that governments want them to, and the cases we will be discussing are also intended to get participants to understand these. I also included a few cases, like the campaign against guinea worm disease in West Africa, that are intended to get participants to think outside their cultural and institutional comfort zone. Sometimes looking at things that are very unfamiliar can be very helpful in clarifying or rethinking why things work the way they do in familiar environments.

Click here to find out more about Prof Weaver's new executive workshop Policy Design and Delivery: Influencing Public Behaviour.