Bringing Public Policy Lessons Closer to Public Sector

Rigorous studies that can provide insights to build institutional capacities of public agencies involve significant capital and human investment. For example, producing the Economy and Development Report (EDR) published by CAF—development bank of Latin America—every year takes two years from the time possible research topics are discussed until it is published. However, having policy lessons permeate through complex public administration networks can be even more challenging.

Much of the quality content and rigorous evidence does not necessarily come in a user-friendly format—either due to its size or the type of language used—, is a paid service, and/or is published in a language other than Spanish. In fact, a survey conducted by VOX in 2016 on 270 scientists found that the seven major problems facing science in their attempt to influence public policy were so-called paywalls that limited access to scientific knowledge, and how poorly communicated scientific findings were.

Even if these barriers are overcome, all knowledge content posted online must compete with the thousands of contents of different types—including fake news. For example, every minute of 2019, people posted 511,200 Tweets, 55,140 photos on Instagram, almost 1,600 blog posts in WordPress and more than 500 hours of video on YouTube. In addition to the fact that all hours in a day are not enough to access and study all these contents, the cognitive biases of our mental processes limit the amount of information we can capture, store and remember.

At the height of the era of post-truth and “Truth Decay”, the line between facts and opinion has been blurred, undermining confidence in previously respected sources of factual information. A clear proof is, for example, the climate change denial, at a time when there is compelling evidence of the influence of human activity on the climate system and of the need to implement a preventive approach.

Instead of bringing knowledge closer to those who need it most, these hurdles pushes it away and make it an unattractive product.

Bringing evidence of successful (and failed) policies closer to public officials in the region is an impending task for development banks, as studies show that they can influence policymakers’ decisions. For example, an experimental study by Hjort, Moreira, Rao and Santini (2019) in 2,150 municipalities in Brazil concluded that providing information on simple, low-cost and effective policies to city governments increased the probability of implementation by 10%.

Traditional dissemination channels are an excellent starting point. For example, in Scioteca, CAF’s online library, hundreds of quality papers are available in more than 100 specialized subjects, including, for example, water and sanitation, rural development, impact assessment, integration, urban mobility, security, transparency and green businesses. By December 2019, CAF had translated into Spanish and published 122 rigorous evidence content in different formats, including summaries of evidence maps, produced by our partners at 3ie, BIT and The Campbell Collaboration.

The next step should be to consider other free access, wide-ranging platforms, and, of course, to foster cultures of learning and knowledge management within public institutions, to help them capitalize on this information, in addition to the knowledge produced by third parties and in daily work. The latter is particularly complicated in the Latin American context, in which political interests prevail over technical criteria. This was clearly reflected in the results of the 2018 Public Management Innovation and Learning Survey, sponsored by CAF and CLAD, on 2,160 public officials in the region: While nearly 70.3% of officials surveyed believe that technical and scientific knowledge should be the main source of influence when designing and implementing policies, only 30% feel that this actually the case. By contrast, while less than 10% of respondents believe that political, electoral and partisan interests should be the principal criteria when designing and implementing policies, just over 37% perceived that this was actually happening (not counting the little over 17% of respondents who considered the main influence factor to be the personal judgment of decision-makers).

In the area of development, research efforts are of no use if their results are not placed in the hands of policymakers. And related challenges are multiplying exponentially, given the speed of the content shared worldwide and the speed with which citizens demand responses from public officials. In this ever-changing dynamic, we need to monitor and feed back our knowledge dissemination processes.