By Younmi Kim
After studying public policy at college, I thought I was ready to work in the public sector. I was wrong! College classes often focus on what to do, or theoretical frameworks of how to do it. Academic lessons were valuable, but not enough to deal with the real problems I faced during policy implementation. In this blog, I share four of the common roadblocks I have identified after working in the South Korean Government and how I’ve learned to deal with them.
I’ll use the example of a smart industrial complex project in South Korea, which is building high-tech infrastructures, such as smart pollution monitoring systems or data centers, to improve productivity and safety in industrial complexes.
Lack of human and financial resources
Policy implementation requires human and financial resources. The problem is that resources are always limited. How to secure them in advance?
Start by using what you already have. Think of your allocated budget or people in the organization that could be reallocated from other projects.
Find allies to implement your project and think of ways to encourage them to join the project. In the case of the Industrial Complex, for example, We assigned a public institution as an implementing agency of the complex innovation project, because it had a lot of experience in managing industrial complexes and communicating with the private firms in the complexes. In terms of resources, I’ve learned that having a close relationship with the budget office facilitates conversations. It is easier to convince them of the importance, urgency, and effectiveness of the project if you have frequent meetings with them, update them on progress and show them that you care.
Consider other alternatives. If increasing resources is not an option, think of ways you can re-dimension your project. For example, scaling down the project or testing it first through a pilot program so you can show results to the personnel or budget offices.
Legal considerations
The lack of laws to support a policy or conflicts with the existing laws can be a major roadblock that is often missed, particularly if you’re not part of the legal team in your organization.
The first thing you need to identify is which laws are relevant to your project. Apart from the research within your organization, sometimes conversations with agencies related to the project can also help you find other relevant regulations.
In some cases, project implementation might require creating a new legal framework. This could be either drafting new laws, adding provisions to existing laws or developing other regulations like executive orders. In the example of industrial complexes, the South Korean National Assembly and the Government amended the Law for Industrial Complex Support by including provisions backing up public support for industrial complex innovation. As we needed a simple legal basis and already had the relevant law, amendment was more suitable than creating a new law.
In other circumstances, there could also be a conflict between your project and existing laws, in which case you should examine the possibility of amendment. When that is not possible, you’ll need to modify your project.
Disagreement within government
While your project might be top priority for your department, other departments and ministries may not even agree with your project.
Each ministry has different policy goals. For example, the Ministry of Industry prioritizes supporting the production activities of enterprises, while the Ministry of Environment focuses on protecting the environment.
Start by exchanging ideas with the relevant ministries. These conversations allow you to learn about their positions and identify problems that you haven’t thought of. It might be that changes to the original project are the way to go in order to get the support required to implement it. However, that might not always be possible and you need to decide which components are worth fighting for.
Conflicts within government sometimes result from overlapping competences. One way to overcome the duplication of mandates is to involve a third organization with coordination and decision-making authority. For example, the Office for Government Policy Coordination under South Korea’s Prime Minister usually helps clarify disagreements between government agencies blocking policy implementation. Having a third party facilitates the search of a solution to maximize policy effectiveness without bias. Remember that the most important thing is not who remains as the authority to do something, but how to maximize the policy effect.
Difficulty in measuring a project’s effectiveness
Measuring effectiveness is important for both policy design and policy implementation. You can use the expected impact of a project, for example, to persuade the personnel and budget offices or get the buy in from relevant agencies that otherwise would oppose to your project. You could also develop a monitoring plan to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of a project during the implementation phase.
The problem is measuring the effectiveness of a project is not always easy. Showing the effectiveness of a policy in advance requires time and resources for research, which is not always available. In that case consider alternatives. For example, research on the effectiveness of policies in your own or other countries. Another alternative is piloting the intervention first. In our example, the Complex Project started as a pilot to assess the outcomes before scaling up, consider though that scaling up has its own set of considerations. The Complex Project also developed a set to indicators to measure its performance, such as the number of complexes under innovation, businesses that have digitalized their production process and number of trainees or new hired employees in the complexes.
Public policy requires teamwork
I shared with you the four major roadblocks I’ve found in my public sector journey so far. One thing I’ve learned is that those roadblocks cannot be removed in isolation, we need to work with other departments and ministries. While at the start it might feel like you are wasting time, the truth is if you don’t do it will only take longer. Finally, be mindful of decision makers’ interests. High-level decision makers are more likely to make an agreement on unresolved issues than the administrative level. Use your boss and government as your secret weapon.
If you haven’t already, I recommend downloading this guide with 5 secrets for effective policy implementation.
