The Politics of Monitoring: Information, Indicators and Targets in Climate Change, Defence and Immigration Policy

监测是政策过程的核心。政策制定者需要收集信息，以便发现问题，并评估他们的政策是否奏效：非法移民有多普遍？国防开支是否有效？二氧化碳的排放量正在减少吗？然而，尽管监测发挥着关键作用，但它一直被学者们所忽视。研究倾向于关注政策是如何制定的，而不是如何跟踪政策问题或如何评估政策的影响。考虑到过去三十年来政府监控做法的巨大变化，这一点令人惊讶。自1981年以来，历届保守党和工党政府都扩大了绩效指标和目标的使用，将其作为一种监测政策的方法。最近，2010年联合政府发誓要扭转“目标文化”，批评强调目标和交付所产生的扭曲。监测实践的这些转变提出了一些关键问题。如何解释目标和指标的吸引力？它们在各政策部门以何种方式实施？“目标文化”如何影响政策结果和政治辩论？一旦到位，回滚这种基于性能的监视实践的可行性如何？我们的研究将首次尝试系统地跟踪、比较和解释英国政府的监测做法，重点关注三个领域——气候变化、移民控制和国防采购。之所以选择这些领域，是因为它们的监测做法发生了相当大的变化；因为它们允许我们测试不同的理论关于影响监测系统的因素。（支持案例提供了案例选择策略的更多细节。）移民政策中出现了一系列衡量移民水平及其经济和社会影响的尝试。但这种监控做法一直充满争议，面对政治和媒体的批评，以及内政部内部的重组，这种做法一再调整。我们期望这些因素能够产生简化的监测实践，以展示政府的影响。减轻公众担忧的压力也可能刺激政策制定者之间的各种“博弈”。相比之下，二氧化碳排放的监测在很大程度上留给了专家和科学公务员。与移民不同，目标的达成不是媒体广泛关注的对象，而是受到政策专家以及国际和欧盟参与者的密切关注。然而，对二氧化碳的关注可能会挤掉对气候变化其他方面的观察，可能会扭曲政策的优先次序和资源分配。此外，我们预计国际规范可能会导致其他形式的“游戏”，旨在绕过外部强加的目标。我们的第三个领域，国防采购，提出了一系列截然不同的挑战。尽管问题持续存在（延误、费用上升、业务业绩不佳），但令人惊讶的是，无论是对过程还是对产出都缺乏监测。我们预计，保密、工业利益以及冲突的不可预测性等问题，使国防部相对地避免了引入严格监控措施的压力——尽管最近关于管理不善和成本过高的争议可能会挑战这种缺乏监督的做法。对这些部门的比较分析将使我们能够更好地了解一般影响监测做法的因素。它还将阐明不同类型的监测（包括目标）如何可能在政策和政治辩论中造成扭曲。因此，它将填补我们对政策制定理解上的一个重要空白。调查结果还应纳入有关有效监测的政治和实践辩论，特别是正在进行的关于公共政策中不同类型目标的可取性的讨论。

Monitoring is central to the policy process. Policymakers need to gather information in order to identify problems, and appraise whether their policies are working: How widespread is illegal immigration? Is defence spending efficient? Are CO2 emissions being reduced? Yet despite its pivotal role, monitoring has been neglected by scholars. Research has tended to focus on how policies get made, rather than how policy problems are tracked or how the impacts of policies are appraised. This is surprising, given the radical changes to government monitoring practices over the past three decades. Since 1981, successive Conservative and Labour administrations have expanded the use of performance indicators and targets as a method of monitoring policy. More recently, the 2010 coalition government vowed to reverse the 'target culture', criticising the distortions that arise from an emphasis on targets and delivery. These shifts in monitoring practices raise a number of key questions. What explains the appeal of targets and indicators, and in what ways have they been implemented across policy sectors? How has the 'target culture' affected policy outcomes and political debate? And once in place, how feasible is it to roll back such performance-based monitoring practices?Our study will provide the first ever attempt to systematically track, compare and explain UK government monitoring practices, focusing on three sectors - climate change, immigration control and defence procurement. These areas have been selected both because they have seen considerable change in monitoring practices; and because they allow us to test different theories about the factors shaping monitoring systems. (The Case for Support offers more detail on the case selection strategy.)Immigration policy has seen a series of attempts to measure immigration levels and their economic and social impacts. But such monitoring practices have been fraught with controversy and repeatedly adjusted in the face of political and media criticism, as well as internal Home Office restructuring. We would expect these factors to produce simplified monitoring practices designed to demonstrate government impact. The pressure to allay public concerns may also incentivise forms of 'gaming' among policymakers. By contrast, the monitoring of CO2 emissions has largely been left to experts and scientific civil servants. Unlike immigration, the meeting of targets is not the object of extensive media attention, but is closely scrutinised by the expert policy community as well as international and EU actors. Yet the focus on CO2 may crowd out observation of other aspects of climate change, potentially distorting policy prioritisation and resource allocation. Moreover, we expect that international norms may lead to other forms of 'gaming' designed to bypass externally imposed targets. Our third area, defence procurement, raises a rather different set of challenges. Despite continued problems (delays, escalating costs, poor operational performance) there has been a surprising lack of monitoring of either processes or outputs. We expect that issues of secrecy, industrial interests, as well as the unpredictability of conflict, have left the MoD relatively screened from pressure to introduce rigorous monitoring practices - though recent controversy over mismanagement and excessive costs may be challenging this lack of scrutiny. The comparative analysis of these sectors will enable us to better understand the factors shaping monitoring practices in general. It will also shed light on how different types of monitoring, including targets, may produce distortions in policy and political debate. It will thereby fill an important gap in our understanding of policymaking. The findings should also feed into political and practitioner debates about effective monitoring, especially ongoing discussions about the desirability of different types of targets in public policy.