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UK funding (332 366 £) : The Politics of Monitoring: Information, Indicators and Targets in Climate Change, Defence and Immigration Policy Ukri01/04/2013 UK Research and Innovation, Royaume Uni
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The Politics of Monitoring: Information, Indicators and Targets in Climate Change, Defence and Immigration Policy
| Abstract | 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. |
| Category | Research Grant |
| Reference | ES/K005170/1 |
| Status | Closed |
| Funded period start | 01/04/2013 |
| Funded period end | 30/06/2016 |
| Funded value | £332 366,00 |
| Source | https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FK005170%2F1 |
Participating Organisations
| University of Edinburgh | |
| University of Glasgow | |
| Government of Scotland |
Cette annonce se réfère à une date antérieure et ne reflète pas nécessairement l’état actuel. L’état actuel est présenté à la page suivante : University OF Edinburgh CHARITY, Edinburgh, Royaume Uni.
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