The end of the Cold War, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, and the end of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) between 1989 and 1991, had far-reaching consequences for SCOs around the world. In Europe, these developments encompassed the enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include CEE countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, among others, as new member states. The consequences for SCOs, including those addressing gender equality in CEE countries, were significant.

A historical look at European women’s movements (Roth, 2017) illustrates the ways in which various political and gender regimes enable and constrain the work of SCOs. As we noted in the Introduction to our book, gender equality movements around the world have been able to achieve significant gains with respect to political, economic, and social rights. Nevertheless, gender equality has still not been achieved at the beginning of the 21st century. Neo-liberalism, as well as the end of socialism, changed the context in which SCMs addressing gender equality in the CEE countries could mobilise. Their activism was shaped by several factors. First, the end of state socialism ended repression and surveillance. This enabled groups that previously met in a clandestine manner around kitchen tables, like the participants of the East German women’s peace movement (Miethe, 1999; 2000) to, instead, organise openly. Second, people in the former socialist countries were confronted with high unemployment and a massive dismantling of the socialist welfare state. Third, CEE countries that, during the Cold War, had provided assistance to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America then became recipients of ‘aid’ focused on strengthening and restoring democracy and civil society. We are putting ‘aid’ in inverted commas to draw attention to the deeply unequal relations between those who deliver and those who receive aid (see Roth et al, 2024). That means that aid is not necessarily oriented at the needs of aid recipients. We discuss humanitarian assistance further later and in the following chapters. Much of this ‘aid’ was delivered by Western SCOs, notably women’s NGOs and political foundations that supported the projects of their CEE partners (Wedel, 2001; Roth, 2007).

Let us start with a couple of examples of SCOs and SCMs. Members of the Coalition of Labour Union Women (CLUW), an organisation that was founded in Chicago 1974 and which bridges the US women’s and labour movements (Roth, 2003), have been involved in a range of social movements simultaneously and successively. Some of the ‘founding mothers’ who were born in the 1920s and 1930s were long-standing trade unionists who were also involved in the civil rights movement marching with Martin Luther King and supporting the women’s movement and the struggle for the Equal Rights amendment. In contrast, some of the ‘rebellious daughters’, who were born in the 1940s and 1950s, had been involved in the farmworkers’ movement, supported the Black Panthers, and were involved in various feminist organisations including a feminist healthcare collective that provided abortions. The ‘political animals’, were involved in community organisations and the Democratic Party, and became union members after starting to work in the public sector. Finally, the ‘fighting victims’ became politicised after they had received support through their union at the workplace. While each of these four types came to CLUW on a different trajectory, what was important to all was to frame ‘women’s issues’ as ‘workers’ issues’ and vice versa while also fighting for racial justice. Many felt that supporting the Democratic Party was an important strategy in addition to participating in strike action and engaging in lobbying at the local, state, and national levels.

Our second example is based on our knowledge of environmentalists, derived from our in-depth interviews with environmental activists and participant observation in environmental organisations. Jo thinks of their self an environmentalist. For the past 15 months they have worked as a conservation volunteer with a county-wide branch of a national conservation organisation in the UK. They spend one weekday every week (outside of the school holidays) working with a small group of other conservation volunteers removing invasive species, planting trees, opening up spaces to allow cattle to graze, and managing ponds. Jo has always been a nature lover, but since volunteering began to appreciate the gravity of the environmental and climate crises through their communications with others. They now attend annual climate change marches, and have, more recently, joined a network that engages in civil disobedience to raise the profile of the climate crisis. At the previous annual climate change march, they encountered a counterdemonstration.

Introduction

A growing interest among policy makers and researchers in the application of behavioural insight to public policy has led to the development of a wide range of behavioural public policy interventions, designed to improve the health of populations by changing behaviour of individuals, groups, communities and/ or populations, implemented at policy level and delivered via legal, fiscal, educational, regulatory, environmental or interpersonal methods. Such interventions draw on diverse fields including psychology, social science and behavioural economics, have been implemented in many contexts including health (Jepson et al, 2010), tax (Hallsworth et al, 2017) and the environment (Schultz et al, 2007; Nomura et al, 2011), and have targeted citizens, professionals, politicians and policy makers (John et al, 2019). Behavioural insights implemented by governments and other agencies have diffused across the world (Afif et al, 2018; John 2019).

With such a plethora of research activities and methods, researchers in the field need better guidelines to work out what they are reading and researching, to locate studies and to plan their own. Guides and templates provide such simplifications, and help the review of the literature too. They also satisfy a general human demand for lists and categorisations. They can be useful for researchers in helping them carry out projects and write papers so that they are clear about what they are doing. They can help locate their study in the literature and help the presentation of the study design and results. In practical fields the use of lists has become common. In medicine, for example, it is now routine for surgeons to follow elaborate checklists to avoid mistakes and to avoid leaving out essential steps or leaving items in a patient’s body. They were resisted at first as intrusions into professional judgement, but over time practitioners have got used to and value them. In a similar way, researchers are getting used to such lists, and many we review here have been going for some time. The question is less about whether to use a list or not, but which list to use. In the conclusion to this chapter, we review whether behavioural public policy researchers could use one overall reporting template for experiments that pulls in other lists.

Introduction

Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) (for example, welfare workers, police officers, educators) interact directly and on a regular basis with citizens, and exercise discretionary power when delivering public services (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003). Such discretion at the frontline is requested to motivate civil servants to enforce policy rules (Tummers, 2011; Tummers and Bekkers, 2014; Thomann et al, 2018) and tailor their implementation decisions to local political contexts and individual circumstances (Lipsky, 1980; May and Winter, 2007). However, it may also lead to less desirable effects, such as gaps between the legislator’s intention and the way policy is delivered (Hupe and Buffat, 2014), or unequal treatment of citizens’ demands (Meyers et al, 1998; Pedersen et al, 2018; Thomann and Rapp, 2018). For instance, when implementing policy tools (for example, granting a disability benefit), frontline welfare workers may use their leeway to prioritise some citizens over others, and justify their discriminatory behaviour by arguing that some citizens (for example, those who are vulnerable, meritorious or worthy) deserve more help than others (Van Oorschot, 2000; Jilke and Tummers, 2018). Such ‘deservingness cues’ and behavioural decision biases are probably legitimised if they resonate with the personal preferences of SLBs (May and Winter, 2007; Dubois, 2010; Raaphorst and Van de Walle, 2018), their moral dispositions (Zacka, 2017), their professional norms (Evans and Harris, 2004), or if they reproduce dominant social stereotypes about different policy beneficiaries (for example, Harrits and Moller, 2014; Kallio and Kouvo, 2015; Einstein and Glick, 2017; Thomann and Rapp, 2018).

These factors also affect the way SLBs process the available information when assessing the policy beneficiaries. This is most likely to take place when they have to tackle highly complex and abundant information in a limited time frame (Brodkin, 2006; 2011; Keiser, 2009). SLBs then tend to develop their own filters to process information, based on personal values and experiences, ideology, adherence to agency goals, background, and so on (Wood and Vetlitz, 2007), thus mechanically focusing on specific pieces of information and neglecting the others. In some cases, such partial information processing may impede the consideration of relevant information and result in less effective decisions (Wood and Vetlitz, 2007). This eventually leads to a disjuncture between the targeted policy goals and the actual implementation practices (Hasenfeld, 2010).

In 2016, the British green transport activist John Stewart won the Sheila McKechnie Foundation Long-Term Achievement Award for excellence in environmental campaigning. Prior to this, in 2011, he came top of the list of the UK’s most effective environmentalists as judged by The Independent newspaper. When we interviewed Stewart in 2001 and again in 2004 he already had an impressive track record of what we might call ‘success’ within a range of environmental SCOs.

Stewart began his environmental SCM career working with a local transport group in Lambeth, London, which sought to make public transport fares fairer. This group became institutionalised and obtained council funding to deliver services to make public transport policy greener. This led to Stewart’s involvement in campaigns against road building in the 1980s. By the late 1980s this work had expanded to coordinating a London-wide network called All London Against the Road Menace (ALARM), which had around 250 local groups. To stop NIMBYism (that is, not-in-my-backyard tendencies), all grassroots groups signing up to this network were asked to pledge to agree to the principle of ‘no more new roads in London’, which prevented groups from pitting themselves against each other, thus preventing conflict and competition among groups pursuing the same goals. In 1990, UK transport minister Cecil Parkinson dropped all of the road schemes planned for London. Stewart told us that – if the anti-roads campaigns of the late 1980s had not been successful – Clapham Common (a significant green space in London) would now be a spaghetti junction of roads full of traffic. After this success, the network turned to help other national anti-road groups struggling to fight what had been dubbed the UK government’s largest road building scheme since the Romans (Saunders, 2013). It morphed into ALARM-UK, with around 300 groups across the country. The network engaged in non-violent direct action and again deemed itself successful. Stewart told us:

Introduction

In focusing attention on the mechanics of behaviour change, nudge makes an important contribution to policy studies. Based on the presumption that decision-making is ‘intuitive and automatic’, Thaler and Sunstein (2008: 6) explain how small changes in the ‘choice architecture’ presented by the environment can prompt people to make better decisions, both for themselves and for society at large. By offering light-touch and low-cost policy interventions, nudge is in tune with times characterised by austerity and a suspicion of big government.

However, nudge is controversial. Among other things, critics point to three problems. The first stems from the passivity of some people who resist nudges intended to prompt more ‘enlightened’ behaviour. The second issue – paradoxically perhaps – is one of excessive suggestibility. Critics claim that some nudges (so-called default nudges) are ethically questionable to the extent that they might manoeuvre people into positions that they would not rationally adopt. Finally, in certain circumstances, researchers point to a boomerang or reactance problem that sees some people respond to nudges in the opposite of the intended direction.

This chapter suggests that progress in understanding the dysfunctions of passivity, suggestibility and reactance requires us to engage more closely with the biases guiding decision-making. Thaler and Sunstein (2008) argue that intuitive decision-making is guided by the way in which choices are framed, a tendency to optimism, a preference for the status quo, an aversion to loss and so forth. John and Stoker (2019: 214) call for a re-examination of these ‘cognitive foundations’. In place of the low-level psychological responses described by Thaler and Sunstein, they give numerous examples of the way in which nudges prompt higher-level thought processes focused on, for example, adherence to norms, reflection, developing aspirations, entering into commitments and so on (John and Stoker, 2019). In such a way, nudges operate in a similar way to traditional policy interventions in appealing to both low-and high-level thought processes (Lin et al, 2017). Of course, the problem with the established mechanisms of behaviour change is that they do not always work.

1. Volunteering in the male life course (1988–90)

Around 1988, Silke joined a project on ‘Socialisation in Retirement’ as research assistant. The project, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German equivalent of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC]), was led by Martin Kohli. It aimed to understand how retired men cope with the loss of paid work to structure their everyday lives. Five groups of men aged 60 and older, some of them still pursuing paid work as part-time workers or self-employed men, were contrasted to different groups of volunteers. Silke was responsible for interviewing volunteers in the Rote Kreutz (Red Cross) and the Arbeiter Samariter Bund (Labour Samaritans’ Union, a first aid organisation associated with the labour movement). The ten life history interviews she conducted revealed that the men started to volunteer in their youth or mid-life, not in their retirement. Subsequently, she examined the role of volunteering in the male life course in her masters’ dissertation, carrying out ten additional interviews with young and middle-aged men. She found that volunteering provided stabilisation throughout the life course, especially crises times, such as unemployment or divorce. Silke’s master’s dissertation also examined the significance of voluntary organisations in modernisation processes. Work on the project has informed our thinking about the necessity of understanding paid and unpaid work in a life course perspective and to consider voluntary organisations as shaped by and contributing to social change.

2. The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in the US (1994–97)

Silke’s next project was her PhD thesis, funded by the Hans Bockler Stiftung (the research foundation of the German Trade Union Federation) and the University of Connecticut. Silke was interested to investigate the challenges of women to get involved and assume leadership positions in bureaucratic organisations. Trade unions had for a long time been male-dominated although this changed due to de-industrialisation and the higher involvement of women in the paid labour force. The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) presented an excellent case study to study efforts of women to change trade unions.

Introduction

Under the headings of ‘Behavioural Public Policy’ (BPP) and ‘Behavioural Public Administration’ (BPA), insights about psychological micro-mechanisms increasingly inform the study, design, and implementation of public policy. While BPP generally refers to interventions that are ‘directly inspired by, and designed on, the principles of behavioral research’ (Galizzi 2014: 27), BPA is defined more specifically as the ‘analysis of public administration from the micro-level perspective of individual behavior’ (Grimmelikhujsen et al 2017: 45; Tummers 2020). Gofen et al (2021: 633) propose the overarching term ‘behavioural governance’ to capture ‘the cognitive and decision processes through which decision-makers, implementing actors and target populations shape and react to public policies and to each other, as well as the impacts of these processes on individual and group behaviour’.

Behavioural interventions are often claimed to be far more than just another tool in the policy toolbox. Instead, they are deemed as an innovative approach to reassess policy making and public administration as a whole. Behavioural interventions and respective analytic perspectives shift the focus of public policy and its implementation to the individual level – behavioural policies are influenced by behavioural science and aimed at changing the individual’s behaviour in a certain situation. By contrast, and perhaps because of this micro-level focus, in many ways the potential of applying behavioural insights throughout the policy process has not yet been fully exploited. Seeking to contribute to filling this gap, this book (emanating from a themed issue in Policy & Politics) features theoretical, methodological, and empirical advancements of the state-of-the-art of BPP and BPA.

Since the early 2000s, BPP and BPA have attracted much political and scientific attention nearly all over the world, and are sometimes presented as an ultimate panacea. At the same time, limitations to behavioural approaches have become evident. For example, behavioural approaches have yet to be applied to more complex problems, rather than merely focusing on ‘low hanging fruits’ (Hansen 2018: 195). Related questions are how behavioural policies and individual-level behaviour translate into policy and social outcomes and to what extent micro-level behavioural insights are accountable to those changes at the meso and macro level of the political system (Jilke et al 2019).

Founded in 1971, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders) is one of the largest and most prominent humanitarian organisations. According to its website, in 2021, the organisation received 97.1 per cent of the funds it raised (€1.94 billion) from more than 7 million individual donors and private institutions (private companies and foundations). The organisation explains that relying on ‘individuals donating small amounts … helps to ensure our operational independence and flexibility to respond at a moment’s notice to the most urgent crises, including those that are under-reported or neglected’. MSF furthermore explains that less than 2 per cent of the total funds raised come from government funding and, since 2016, in opposition to the damaging migration deterrence policies, MSF refuses to take funds from the EU, its member states, and Norway. The SCO also eschews the acceptance of funding from companies and industries that are in conflict with the provision of medical humanitarian work, for example pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies; extraction industries (such as oil, natural gas, gold or diamonds); tobacco companies; and arms manufacturers). The organisation thus has strict policies on its funding sources. It is clear in its determination to turn down financial support from sources that contradict the values of MSF. This allows MSF not only to decide where and how to allocate its resources but also to speak out against the policies and actions of governments and companies. In 1999, MSF was awarded the Nobel Prize in recognition of its pioneering humanitarian work around the world.

In this chapter, we discuss the different resources needed to carry out the work of SCOs. These material and non-material resources include people, knowledge (experience and expertise), money to pay salaries, travel costs and accommodation, goods, access to media and meeting space, and much more. We also examine how these resources are mobilised and argue that decision making processes about access to resources are a central part of organising for change. As our introductory vignette discussing MSF’s fundraising strategy demonstrates, some SCOs consciously avoid and refuse support that would constrain their ability to speak out, criticise, or to engage in disruptive action.

Introduction

Behavioural public policy (BPP) has been suggested as a new policy paradigm to utilise behavioural insights, that is, evidence-based expertise on human behaviour, for policy making. So far, behavioural policies are predominantly based on insights from behavioural economics and psychology in order to ‘nudge’ people to act in line with predefined aims and to overcome the dilemma of behaviour that contradicts economic rationality and is in conflict with desired policy ends. However, behavioural insights are ‘embedded in several historical trajectories and contexts rather than converged into one pattern’ (Strassheim and Beck, 2019: 5). Thus, the term refers by no means exclusively to people’s bounded rationality (Simon, 1991), even if it is this context which BPP is mostly associated with. Instead, we advocate to conceptualise BPP as a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological policy concept that utilises insights from the whole range of behavioural research for plural purposes throughout the policy process.

Against this backdrop, this chapter makes a contribution to the theory of BPP by investigating the abundance of behavioural and social sciences, as well as pluralistic methods and research findings that effectively lay the ground for our ‘advanced BPP’ – a concept that is much broader in terms of applied disciplines and methods than its predecessor. In line with the introduction to this themed issue (Ewert et al, 2020), advanced BPP moves considerably beyond nudge politics and those behavioural interventions that exclusively focus on the micro level of policy making. Hence, we attempt to identify conceptual voids with regard to different fields of social sciences as a grounding for future behavioural policies. Based on a wider disciplinary and methodological foundation, we seek to further the conceptual shaping of behavioural policy making which is still very likely to be equated with a top-down roll-out of behaviour change policies (Jones et al, 2013), notwithstanding some efforts to extend its meaning and application forms (see for example, Gopalan and Pirog, 2017). Furthermore, current BPP mostly tends to perceive people’s behaviour as being isolated from social, cultural and environmental conditions that surround ‘the “doers” of behaviour’ (Spotswood and Marsh, 2016: 286). In contrast to any kind of activity that, speaking in Granovetter’s (1985: 483) terms, is embedded in and constituted by people’s various social relations, behavioural policy makers seem to be inclined to an ‘undersocialised conception of human action’.

Introduction: the rise of behavioural insights in government

Understanding how incentives and constraints influence the behaviour of citizens and social groups has always been fundamental to the theory and practice of good governance and regulatory systems. The distinctive contribution of behavioural sciences in recent decades (based especially in social psychology, criminology, marketing and economics) has been to sharpen our appreciation that habitual and emotive factors shape the actual choices of citizens (Kahneman, 2011; Halpern, 2015; Thaler, 2016). Citizens’ responses to the rules and options devised by lawmakers are not only diverse, but also often against the interests of the citizens themselves. Thus, empirical research to improve policy makers’ understanding of citizen behaviour was championed as an evidence-based pathway towards improving policies and service systems. These behavioural studies gradually became more influential as the cost-effectiveness of mainstream programmes came under heavy criticism.

In government, the application of this particular framework of behavioural science is often undertaken by specialised teams. These teams have rapidly emerged all over the world – in Europe, the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Australia, New Zealand and many more countries (OECD, 2017). There is no dominant model across these diverse contexts. Behavioural teams have been working in many policy domains and with a variety of partner organisations across government, industry and civil society. A recent World Bank report has highlighted the different ways in which ten countries have implemented behavioural policies. These behavioural initiatives included both centralised and decentralised organisational models, and were managed through either formal arrangements or more networked approaches. Some initiatives focused on the early stages in policy design, while others considered implementation issues and programme evaluation (World Bank, 2018). This variety illustrates both the broad intellectual foundations of the behavioural sciences and the wide spectrum of possible applications across issues and problems.

Among the variety of initiatives inspired by the behavioural sciences in government, a notable model that attracted global attention was the UK Behavioural Insights Team (BIT UK), initially developed in the UK Cabinet Office. This team, led by David Halpern, has become a distinctive and successful model; indeed, in 2014, it evolved into a not-for-profit consulting company (Halpern, 2015; John, 2018).

Beyond nudge: the contribution of this edited volume

Public policy and administration have undergone a behavioural turn within the last decade. The nine chapters of this edited volume further emphasise this development. As a starting point, we have argued that despite quickly evolving paradigms such as Behavioral Public Policy and Administration (BPP/ BPA), the utilisation of behavioural insights in policy making requires further conceptual and methodological refinement and robust empirical evidence (Moynihan 2018).

Regarding the impact of behavioural interventions, we suggest a behavioural model of the policy process, which recognises that the impact of behavioural interventions unfolds beyond the micro level. Individual actions influenced by behavioural policies produce relevant social outcomes at the meso and macro level. Significantly, these social outcomes have implications of greater scale than individual effects of behavioural approaches. Seen this way, behavioural approaches have political and societal consequences. For example, rather than causing merely individual behaviour change at the micro level, behavioural policies make a difference at the meso and macro level, for instance by altering people’s collective perceptions of social reality.

When designing and applying behavioural policies, these policies should always be understood as a result of political processes that include the influence of powerful interests and ideological frames. Even if behavioural policies are presented as a form of ‘evidence-based policy making’, the evidence production and frame is political. These insights advance the academic debate on behavioural policy making by contributing to the closing of the ‘great schism’ (Moynihan 2018) between micro and macro policies (Roberts 2020) and by adding social value and political embeddedness to the varieties of behavioural practices. Furthermore, it also enriches the debate on evidence based policy making with regards to its chances and limits in times of multiple crises, for example the climate crisis which we will discuss in more depth in this conclusion.

Insights emanating from our model support and accelerate the unfinished process of applying behavioural sciences in public policy and administration (Hallsworth and Kirkman 2020). This final chapter investigates the opportunities for applying our behavioural model of the policy process in three steps. First, we discuss how the model has been perceived by scholars of public policy and administration so far, in relation to which research topics and contexts.