Attributing Outcomes to Social Policy Interventions - 'Gold Standard' or 'Fool's Gold' in Public Policy and Management?
Attributing Outcomes to Social Policy Interventions - 'Gold Standard' or 'Fool's Gold' in Public Policy and Management?
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1467-9515.2012.00869.x
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发表时间：
2014-02-01
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Bovaird, Tony
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Bovaird, Tony
近年来，人们对基于结果的社会决策和管理越来越感兴趣。英国一直走在这一运动的前沿，但类似的运动在国际上也有发现。自1980年代以来，评价和业绩管理方面的以结果为基础的运动特别推动了这种对以结果为基础的决策的兴趣，这种运动的范围随着时间的推移而扩大，慢慢地将其重点从减少费用和衡量产出转变为衡量结果。这一变化受到了政策制定者、从业者和学者的广泛欢迎。然而，有证据表明，实际情况往往不如夸夸其谈。此外，将结果的变化归因于特定社会政策的归因问题仍然是一个主要问题。构建因果模型的概念解决方案是从政策评估领域引入的，直到最近才成为操作这些模型的常见方法。本文概述了最近对基于结果的社会政策制定的兴趣演变，以及对归因问题重要性的日益认识。然后，它概述了因果关系的政策建模方法如何部分解决归因问题，但也指出了其固有的局限性。最后，本文在当前的英国社会政策制定中使用了几个案例研究，以证明因果模型中嵌入推理的潜在重要性，以及在政策制定中采用这种方法而不了解其概念基础或在不合适的领域的危险，考虑到我们对社会政策系统的当前知识状态。
In recent years there has been increased interest in outcome-based social 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 policy-making 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.