People join the public sector dreaming of making an impact. Soon, they found themselves frustrated by not being able to move an idea or project forward. What hinders implementation and where could we pay more attention to get things done? By focusing on the details.
Effective policy implementation is on the details
Attention to detail can determine the success or failure of a policy.
Harvard Professor Matt Andrews refers to those details as the Mundane. The everyday, boring, taken for granted events, pressures, relationships, activities, etc. Those ordinary things we could think don’t matter, but actually, are the key to ‘getting things done.
Just think about how many implicit assumptions you make when you implement a project. The things that will ‘obviously’ happen but don’t, the things that ‘someone’ would do but didn’t. In practice, it’s in the details where you can find the essence of effective policy implementation.
A plumbing mindset
Esther Duflo, Nobel Price of Economics, explains this concept well in her paper The Economist as the Plumber. She argues that ‘details that we as economists might consider relatively uninteresting are in fact extraordinarily important in determining the final impact of a policy or a regulation, while some of the theoretical issues we worry about most may not be that relevant’.
As public servants, we’re more in touch with reality on the ground. So, while our focus won’t be necessarily on theoretical issues, as Duflo describes it, it isn’t always into the details of policy implementation either. It’s exactly there that we have a blindspot.
Duflo explains there are different types of approaches to the design of policies and regulations. A scientific approach provides a general framework to guide the design. It’s theoretical, not necessarily practical. An engineering approach considers general principles but applies them to a specific situation, considering the particular characteristics of the environment (or at least, their understanding of the context). Finally, the plumbing mindset, as she calls it, goes one step further. It recognizes there’s uncertainty and unknowns and that we can’t possibly know how things will turn out. Therefore, this mindset applies the frameworks in the real world, carefully watches what happens and then adapt as required.
What I love about Duflo’s plumbing mindset idea is that it focuses more on understanding how to do things rather than what to do. By doing so, it brings attention to details and to the reality in which things occur. The idea of adapting and experimenting depending on the results we see is another valuable principle.
The problem is details are often ignored
Many well-intentioned policies fail in practice (or don’t succeed as well as they could have) even if their underlying principles were sound because the details are not gotten right. Details are a determinant of policy success, yet, sometimes they do not seem to be given as much attention by economists, policymakers, or public servants. There are many possible explanations.
Lack of time, or interest. The public sector is characterized by work under pressure, in which case the inclination is to choose what’s fast and easy. Paying attention to details could seem like a waste of time. In other cases, it could just be that a bigger picture view, with an oversimplification of reality, by design, omit the details.
Avoid dealing with details could be another explanation. In her paper, Duflo adds a quote from Abhijit Banerjee’s essay Inside the Machine, that summarizes it well:
“The reason we like these buttons so much, it seems to me, is that they save us the trouble of stepping into the machine. By assuming that the machine either runs on its own or does not run at all, we avoid having to go looking for where the wheels are getting caught and figuring out what small adjustments it would take to get the machine to run properly. To say that we need to move to a voucher system does not oblige us to figure out how to make it work –how to make sure that parents do not trade in the vouchers for cash (because they do not attach enough value to their children’s education) and that schools do not take parents for a ride (because parents may not know what a good education looks like). And how to get the private schools to be more effective? After all, at least in India, even children who go to private schools are nowhere near grade level. And many other messy details that every real program has to contend with. “
We also encounter what Banerjee and Duflo described as the three I’s: ideology, ignorance, and inertia. The problem is policy design is often based on the ideology of the time, in complete ignorance of the reality of the field, and once these policies are in place, they just stay in place. Under that scenario attention to detail is unlikely.
Where to focus the attention
Hopefully, by now, I’ve convinced you that details matter if you want to implement a policy effectively. There are three areas where we could focus our attention to improve policy success:
1. Design of the tap (to continue with Duflo’s plumbing analogy): taking care of apparently irrelevant details, such as the way the policy is communicated or the default options offered to customers.
2. Layout of the pipes: important logistical decisions that are fundamental to the policy’s functioning but often treated as purely mechanical, such as the way money flows from point A to point B, or which government worker has sign-off on what decisions.
3. Implicit assumptions (I couldn’t think of a way to continue the analogy here-sorry-, but I think it’s worth mentioning it): When we chose a course of action (or inaction) we’re making assumptions along the way. You assume, for example, that people would know how to register for the program, but don’t. A practice that can be helpful to adopt is to make explicit some of those assumptions.
The remaining challenge
If policy implementation were easy, we would live in a problem-free, developed world. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. There’s still a long way to go regarding implementation, particularly in developing countries. To get there requires a mix of art, getting the details right, and science, getting the framework and the approach right. Closer attention to detail, combined with a rapid iteration to fix problems as we see them will help us improve the art and science of policy implementation.
