Archive for December, 2010

Lord Turner, Baroness Drake, James Purnell and other officials  involved in the Turner Commission on Pensions recently shared their experience with the Institute (PDF, 189KB) as part of our series looking at policy successes of the last 30 years. With the Coalition’s commitment to over 40 independent reviews, the story of the Pensions Commission...

We are coming near to the end of the Permanent Secretary musical chairs which started in the summer.

Since the Institute published its MINDSPACE report in March, there has been an explosion of interest and activity around behavioural economics. Most notably, my co-author David Halpern now heads up a new Behavioural Insights Team in the Cabinet Office, which is tasked with ‘applying behavioural economics to policy in a systematic way’.

The Draft Cabinet Manual’s 148 pages cover everything  from the role of the Sovereign – placed first ahead of elections — to the roles of the Cabinet, Parliament, the civil service and the law, and relations with the devolved institutions.

The days of central command and control are over. The future means a devolved approach to government with network structures and greater use of private and civil society collaborative arrangements.

Completing a jigsaw puzzle is one of life’s simple pleasures. After poring over 1000 small pieces of cardboard for many hours, slotting the final piece into place is a suitably rewarding experience. Conversely, getting to the end of the puzzle only to find that one piece is missing is the ultimate frustration.

Coined 20 years ago by Harvard academic Joseph Nye, soft power has become an increasingly ubiquitous term. Simply put, it is the ability of a state to achieve a desired outcome through the leveraging of legitimacy – or better still, attraction.

Government failure gets far more attention than government success, but British governments can point to a string of stunning policy triumphs in the past 30 years.

As part of our ‘Better policy-making’ project, we asked members of the Political Studies Association, academics working in the field of politics, what they thought had been the most successful policies of the last 30 years.