Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea became Practice

What is Behavioural Public Policy? What does it mean to people designing and implementing policy in Australia, and to citizens on the receiving end of policy? In today’s post, Sarah Ball  discusses her research into Australia’s attempts to incorporate behavioural insights into public policy, and shares what led her to write her newly-released book, Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea became Practice.  

Behavioural public policy (BPP) made a major impact in policy circles both in Australia and internationally in the years following the global financial crisis. Starting with the Behavioural Insights Team in the UK (BIT UK) in 2010, there are now teams working with and within governments across the globe, including NSW and Victorian state governments and many Federal Government departments. Perhaps the most well-known behavioural policy initiative was implemented by the UK tax office, with a change to their standard debt letter reminding citizens that 90% of people pay their tax on time. This saw a change in repayment behaviour that amounted to millions of pounds of revenue. This type of small-scale and cost-effective tweak is known as a ‘nudge’ and it is often considered to be the bread and butter of BPP. However, as my new book - Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea became Practice - shows, nudge is not the only thing that attracted policy makers to BPP. There are also many different interpretations of how it works in practice.

My book was initially borne out of my own enthusiasm for behavioural insights in policy. As a policy officer with the Department of Social Services I had attended several training sessions and was convinced that the promised combination of nudging, behaviourally-informed policy design, and the use of randomised controlled trials would be able to address several of the concerns I had about the design and implementation of policy in Australia. Eventually, I went off to do a PhD to better understand the barriers and facilitators to using behavioural insights. What I found, however, was a much more complex picture than I had initially imagined.

Drawing on my PhD research, my book looks specifically at how one team, the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA), managed the different interpretations of BPP and designed and implemented it across the Federal Government during its establishment in 2016-2017. Using interviews, observation and a historical examination of the public service and policy practice, it explores how ideas like behavioural insights are interpreted and mobilised within the policy process. Ultimately, in trying to determine how behavioural insights were being used, my main questions came to be – how do people understand behavioural insights, how is it being implemented and what do these different understandings reveal about the narratives and ideas that are persuasive in the design and implementation of policy in Australia?

The answers to these questions revolve around the three different interpretations of BPP that emerged during my time with the BETA team. These different ways of thinking were not always well-defined, but they all responded to policy problems in different ways.

The first interpretation saw BPP as a way to facilitate a more evidence-based and rigorous approach to designing and evaluating policy interventions, to find ‘what works’, generally through the use of randomised controlled trials and academic principles. The second interpretation saw behavioural policy as defined by nudges and small-scale tweaks. It relied on the principles of responsible government and authoritative choice, and the idea that the public service was objectively expected to deliver policy as determined by the government of the day and their goal was to do this as efficiently and effectively as possible. The third was focused on finding a solution most desirable by citizens, and that BPP would help design more user-centred, behaviourally-informed policy interventions. 

Ultimately, these different interpretations of behavioural policy led to an ongoing negotiation about which interventions were, and were not, suitable for BPP. These negotiations revealed much about BPP, but also about policy practice more broadly. Rather than viewing the adoption of policy ideas and innovations as a linear, rational process where an idea travels from point A to B and arrives in essentially the same form, it is essential to think of this work as an act of translation where fidelity can be lost, and the adaptation can tell us about the culture and traditions within which the actors and organisations are operating. Instruments and ideas are not static objects with a concrete meaning all their own. They are shaped to fit the context and they can shape the context in return.

Since BETA was initially launched, it has undertaken some projects which have clearly demonstrated the significant value of BPP in achieving best-practice policy work. Key examples involve projects that encourage the exploration of how information is processed by citizens, rather than relying on a purely rational model. While the rational model tends to assume that providing more information is sufficient, behavioural science provides insights into how to most effectively present this information to avoid biases and errors in judgement. For example, BETA developed a guide for National Broadband Network (NBN) service providers that outlined how to best support customers in making an informed decision about which plan was best.

BETA has also demonstrated that the use of trials is feasible and valuable for government. This is not only because trials are useful for assessing what works in policy, but they also encourage a humbler attitude to policy making. We do not always know which solutions are effective. Examples such as BETA’s 2016 individually randomised controlled trial of shortlisting processes in recruitment in the Australian Public Service illustrate the benefits of learning from a trial before moving to broader implementation. It is vital we explore how ideas like BPP are shaped by, and, in turn, shape, policy design and implementation, so we can ensure we can make transparent and informed decisions about the appropriateness of a policy intervention to address the problem at hand. On that basis, BPP can play an important role in building more effective, efficient and equitable policy outcomes.

Content moderator: Sue Olney