https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/public-purpose/files/iipp-wp-2018-06_1.pdf

This report explores the implications of a mission-orientated approach for policy appraisal and evaluation. We argue that market-shaping, ‘mission-oriented’ policies should be evaluated on three levels:

• enhancing user experience and engagement;
• expanding technological frontiers;
• and broader macroeconomic multiplier effects.

While the shift towards challenge-led policy is becoming more tangible, a key question is whether existing policy tools – from conceptual frameworks to evaluation methodologies and data analytics – enable or in fact constrain such a shift.

Indeed, perhaps the main danger for challenge-led policy making is that it will be used as a new label for ‘business as usual’.

Rather than assessing the impact of policy based on budget-constrained, static, allocative efficiency measures, this paper argues it should be focused on dynamic efficiency and the creation of collective public value.

This approach would help capture the potential for policy to create spillover effects across many sectors of the economy and alter the level of investment and broader trajectory of economic growth

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Where does the problem come from?

For policy appraisal and evaluation, marketing-fixing policy making creates a bias towards inaction as the default assumption is that the market will find the best outcome and even if it doesn’t the overriding concern is that government intervention may worsen existing outcomes. Therefore the default prescription for government policy is to maintain the status quo.

• There is a danger that analytical frameworks for policy become focused more on justifying and measuring the non-failure of public policies rather than the attainment of wider policy goals.

this is interesting as it feels like policy making is constantly trying to justify spend and there is no room for experimentation or prototypes that fail to learn. It’s almost like gov is adopting an ‘agile’ way of working and that is a complete juxtaposition to the dominant form of policy making which creates all of these strange tensions and trade-offs that civil servants acknowledge but cant do anything about.

• This also introduced efficiency targets for government – and related performance pay systems for civil servants – to mimic profits; decentralisation and proliferation of new at-arms-length agencies (running on efficiency targets and performance pay systems);
• opening up public services to competition from different private providers; and outsourcing and privatising certain services.
• It also gave rise to a culture of impact assessment that relied on cost-benefit analysis, productivity measurements and various indicators, indexes and ranking systems to measure policy success or failure (Kattel et al. 2013).

Why the state? (Interesting for power)