What is it about?
In recent years there has been increased interest in outcome-based public policy-making and management. The UK has been in the forefront of this movement but similar movements have been identified internationally. This interest in outcome-based decision-making has been given particular impetus through the ‘results’-based movement in evaluation and performance management since the 1980s, which has increased in scope over time, slowly changing its emphasis from cost reduction and measuring outputs to measuring outcomes. This change has been widely welcomed by policymakers, practitioners and academics. However, there is evidence that the reality is often rather less than the rhetoric. Moreover, the ‘attribution problem’ of attributing changes in outcomes to specific social policies has remained a major issue. The conceptual solution of constructing ‘cause-and-effect’ models, imported from the policy evaluation field, has only recently become common for operationalising these models. This article outlines the evolution of interest in outcome-based social policymaking up to recent times and the growing realization of the importance of the attribution problem. It then outlines both how the ‘cause-and-effect’ policy modelling approach can partially tackle the attribution problem, but also its inherent limitations. Lastly, the article uses several case studies in current UK social policy-making to demonstrate the potential importance of the reasoning embedded within cause-and-effect models but also the dangers in policy-making which adopts this approach without understanding its conceptual basis or in fields where it is inappropriate, given the current state of our knowledge of social policy systems.
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Why is it important?
This is one of the very few articles in the academic literature to demonstrate cause-and-effect chains linking social policies to publicly-desired outcomes, using actual case studies of 'pathways to outcomes'. These case studies focus in particular on UK health and social care in recent years.
Perspectives
There is much talk about outcome-based commissioning and outcome-based service delivery but much of it appears to be largely unaware of the major consequences of such an approach in a world where the relative importance of different outcomes is highly contentious and where we are highly uncertain of how to achieve outcomes through our public interventions. This article highlights what outcome-based policy really entails - and where it is likely to be inappropriate.
Professor Tony Bovaird
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Attributing Outcomes to Social Policy Interventions - ‘Gold Standard’ or ‘Fool's Gold’ in Public Policy and Management?, Social Policy and Administration, October 2012, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9515.2012.00869.x.
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