HIGHLIGHTS

• The world continues to grow wealthier, but not necessarily better governed.
• In view of continuingly underperforming and costly efforts to improve public service delivery across most of the world, ideas42 created “Official Action” A Roadmap for Using Behavioral Science in Public Administration Reform. 
• This report is among the first to offer a practical roadmap for public sector reformers to apply behavioral science as a complement to existing reform programs.

The Challenge

The world continues to grow wealthier, but not necessarily better governed. The rapid economic growth of the last several decades has resulted in a majority of the world’s most impoverished citizens now living in middle-income countries. The inequality this implies is perhaps the clearest indication of stagnation in government: the systems required to manage and deploy newly created wealth to support broader development goals have not kept pace with wealth creation itself. 

Direct evidence of this fact is most visible in the widespread and severe shortcomings in everyday public services that even citizens in relatively prosperous middle-income countries continue to expect from their governments. To name a few examples, recent studies in India have found a 23.6% rate of workplace absence among teachers in rural schools, climbing to up to 30% for primary health providers—and when the latter do show up, more than half the time they lack formal training.

At the same time, there are limitations in public service delivery despite considerable investments in and focus on the “modernization” of systems, technology and human capacity in government in recent years.

Our Approach

In view of continuingly underperforming and costly efforts to improve public service delivery across most of the world, ideas42, with support from The Asia Foundation, created “Official Action” A Roadmap for Using Behavioral Science in Public Administration Reform. The report offers new solutions to everyday challenges, such as ensuring that all complaints and requests receive equal treatment; helping front-line bureaucrats operate efficiently despite increasing workloads; and fighting corruption within public institutions by demonstrating that governance failures are in large part due to the situations that public servants find themselves in, rather than individual shortcomings.

“Official Action” is among the first to offer a practical roadmap for public sector reformers to apply behavioral science as a complement to existing reform programs. The report offers both a methodology for designing behavioral interventions in government as well as pragmatic rules of thumb for selecting behaviors to focus on, institutions to target, and context-appropriate impact evaluation techniques. Case studies summarize prominent examples of previous applications to issues, such as the fight against corruption and an initial case study drawing on insights from fieldwork conducted on decentralization in Nepal.

Takeaway

“Official Action” shows that at least some of public institutions’ failures are not simply due to a lack of resources, accountability, competence, or motivation; but that they may be symptoms of the unique stresses that public servants face, which, if left unchecked, can derail even the most dedicated officials.

Interested in learning more about this work applying behavioral science to a crucial social problem? Reach out to us at info@ideas42.org or tweet at @ideas42 to join the conversation.