The R Word

There is a conversation building…

There is a conversation building on the edges of public policy in Europe, the United States and Australasia. Maybe elsewhere in the world as well.

The main talk continues to be about efficiency, about the linear connections between inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes. These are the NPM words, new public management speak that has come to dominate in the last 30 years. It has slowly embraced a language of science that encourages a focus on risks that lead to problems, and on interventions that prevent the risks and so reduce the problems.

When risks are multiple. When complexity is disorganised. When the state’s resources are scarce. Then the conversation has to shift.

The NPM words add up to the I word, intervention, the idea that public policy can fix people, sort out their problems, put the world to rights.

There are countless examples where this logical thinking has reaped reward. But there are also many social problems that resist such analysis. When risks are multiple. When complexity is disorganised. When the state’s resources are scarce. Then the conversation has to shift.

The R Word is one of several emerging conversations about public policy. For six months or so in 2017 a group of policy wonks, scientists, practitioners, communications experts, philosophers, philanthropists, innovators, people facing down disadvantage in their own lives, others whose work or experience resists easy description, all of them will engage in a series of discussions and observations that put relationships at the heart of public policy.

The first series entitled “Shame, Pity and Guilt in Public Policy” starts with Alison Denham, a philosophy professor at Tulane and Oxford universities who roots a reflection on the role of these emotions in public policy in the story of Oedipus.