Sarah Ball

University of Melbourne | MSD · School of Social and Political Sciences

Background The emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic has required a rapid acceleration of policy decision making, and raised a wide range of ethical issues worldwide, ranging from vaccine prioritisation, welfare and public health ‘trade-offs’, inequalities in policy impacts, and the legitimacy of scientific expertise. Aims and objectives Thi...

The exercise of administrative discretion by street-level workers plays a key role in shaping citizens’ access to welfare and employment services. Governance reforms of social services delivery, such as performance-based contracting, have often been driven by attempts to discipline this discretion. In several countries, these forms of market govern...

Governments across the globe have expressed their interest in forms of codesign and coproduction as a useful tool for crafting policy solutions. Genuine relationships between partners are seen as an important way to build meaningful and lasting impact for policy. One area of interest in this space has been on how researchers and policymakers can wo...

Behavioral public policy (BPP) has become increasingly popular with governments across the globe but what defines it in practice? It is not a concrete concept, encompassing a series of instruments, evaluation methods and theoretical influences. Using the findings from an ethnographic study of a behavioral insights team in the Australian Government...

Behavioural and experimental projects have become increasingly popular with policymakers. Behavioural insights teams have used several policy design and implementation tools drawn from behavioural sciences, especially randomised controlled trials, to test the design of ‘nudge’ interventions. This approach has attained discursive legitimacy in gover...

‘Behavioural Insights’ has emerged as an increasingly popular approach to policy making in governments across the globe. Practitioners largely present a frontstage narrative of Behavioural Insights as a coherent concept but this article challenges such a description. We explore how efforts to develop a global Behavioural Insights community are subj...