You
are invited to attend the last SCID(Social Complexity of Immigration
and Diversity) seminar before the summer break to be given by
Professor Graham Room (University of Bath).
Please pass on the details to anyone who may be interested in attending.
Date: Friday 25 May 2012
Time: 13.00 – 14.15
Venue: The Board Room (2.016) Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester.
Title: Causal Dynamics and Policy Development: the contribution of evolutionary and complexity perspectives
Abstract:
How can public policy-makers make good
decisions? The most common answer is that good policy decisions are
evidence-based. The advocates of EBPM are typically concerned with
evidence of the impact of a particular intervention.
Evidence is collected and evaluated – ‘systematically reviewed’ – so as
to produce a rigorous assessment of ‘what works’. In practice however
any new policy is launched into a world already crowded with policy
initiatives, ancient and modern, whose effects
and impacts interact. Nevertheless, if we make some simplifying
assumptions, appropriate statistical methods are available with which we
can, in principle, partition and disaggregate these effects and isolate
the contribution to those impacts of any particular
intervention. To separate out these effects is however more than just a
technical matter. It carries an implicit ontology of the social world,
as one that can be disaggregated into a set of independent ‘variables’
that additively compose this world’s causal
mechanisms. The challenge to this ontology has been voiced with
particular eloquence by Pawson (Evidence-Based Policy: A Realist
Perspective, 2006). A social policy intervention does not so much impact
upon as engage with active stakeholders. The ‘impacts’
of the intervention depend in part on how these stakeholders respond
and what projects they pursue. Stakeholders pull them in different
directions, partly in pursuit of their respective projects, but also as a
result of the practical learning and knowledge
exchange that accompanies any intervention.
Pawson offers a response in terms of
‘critical realism’. This is centrally concerned with the foregoing
contingencies, unpicking the ways that they activate, inhibit or reshape
the impact of any given policy intervention. It
is in these terms that Pawson lays out a new protocol for systematic
reviews and illustrates its application in a series of case studies.
This still leaves Pawson focussing primarily on the individual
intervention. Interventions however are not isolated: they
are embedded in multiple systems of interacting elements. Nor are
interventions and their potentialities fixed. On the contrary, the
identity, the potentialities and the impact of any intervention are
contingent on the various synergies that it develops
– or fails to develop - with other interventions. This is an
evolutionary version of realism. What matters are the transformative
synergies that develop among these interventions and their stakeholders.
It is this ontology of evolutionary or transformative
realism that provides the vantage point from which this paper will
re-consider the theory and practice of EBPM and systematic review.
Further information about the series can be found at
http://scidproject.wordpress.
No registration needed, all welcome.
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