Targets in Public Policy: Disciplining or Signaling?

Targets are a popular tool in public policy, held up as a way to promote integration and accountability. Below, Professor Christina Boswell looks at how effective they really are. You can check out her full report here.c

A new paper I prepared for the PSA conference in Manchester next week explores the functions of targets in UK immigration and asylum policy. It’s part of our ongoing project on the Politics of Monitoring. The paper examines the tensions between two rather different uses of targets: targets as a political device for signaling commitment to certain goals, and as a managerial tool for improving organizational performance. It focuses on the case of targets on immigration and asylum adopted between 2000-2010 as part of the government’s Public Service Agreements (PSA). The paper argues that:

1. The initial process-based PSA targets on asylum largely failed to function as effective political signals – with the result that senior political figures instead created new, more publicly digestible, targets outside of the PSA system.  This seems to reflect a wider problem with attempts to signal performance through technocratic tools of measurement. Especially in policy areas characterised by more populist narratives, such as immigration and asylum, anecdote and focusing events may be more powerful in constructing policy problems and government performance than dry data and figures.

2. Where political leaders did set more high profile targets, this create a number of political risks. Ambitious “stretch” targets in particular exposed them to the danger of being seen to fail. Even where the government was able to meet targets, it found that it was not politically rewarded. There was no “air time” for broadcasting news about government achievement of targets. Arguably, this asymmetry in the political capital accruing from public targets was one of the reasons Labour retreated from the use of targets as a signalling device in the late 2000s (though of course their successors embraced a new immigration target with zeal!).

3. The attempt to conjoin signalling and disciplining functions created a number of organizational problems. This was especially the case where (non-PSA) politically driven targets were set in a top-down manner, without due regard to organizational capacity. While such top-down interventions certainly galvanised action, the changes they effected were arguably short-term, highly localised, and tended to produce a number of distortions and forms of gaming.

This post first appeared on Prof. Boswell's personal blog http://christinaboswell.wordpress.com/

Posted by Gemma Carey