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Last updated: 25 October 2007
Changing behaviour: A public policy perspective
1. Introduction
Governments seek to regulate or influence the behaviour of individuals and organisations through a range of policy tools, including legislation, sanctions, regulations, taxes and subsidies, the provision of public services and information and guidance material.
What are the basic reasons that governments want to influence or change behaviour? The most fundamental reason is that it can confer economic, social and community benefits. Regulations to prevent collusive behaviour among businesses, for example, can result in lower prices and greater consumer choice. Some behaviours are simply undesirable and need to be prevented. Crime is one such example. In some cases, individuals do not always behave in their own or the community’s best interests. There are many examples of this in the areas of public health (e.g. obesity and tobacco use) and in the environmental area (e.g. recycling and water use).
In many areas of public policy the range of traditional tools to influence behaviour works well. For some social policy problems, however, influencing human behaviour is very difficult and complex, and the effectiveness of traditional approaches may be limited without some additional tools and understanding of how to engage citizens in cooperative behavioural change.
In recent years a great deal more has been learned about why human beings behave in the ways they do:
… increasingly sophisticated marketing has rapidly put this knowledge to use. Yet speedy uptake of the new evidence by the marketers and advertisers has not been matched in government and policymaking circles. Policy is still being developed on the back of an anachronistic understanding of how behaviour is influenced and what makes people change. If we are to move beyond the current limited policy approach, then new thinking is required.1
Governments in a range of countries are becoming increasingly interested in tapping into the improved knowledge about behavioural change. There are three key factors, outlined below, that have encouraged this interest.
(i) Government Cannot Solve Complex Problems Alone
There is a growing range of complex policy areas, so-called ‘wicked’ problems, where it has become increasingly clear that government cannot simply ‘deliver’ key policy outcomes to a disengaged and passive public. In the areas of welfare, health, crime, employment, education and the environment, it is clear that achieving significant progress requires the active involvement and cooperation of citizens. The Australian Public Service Commission has published a discussion paper, Tackling Wicked Problems: A Public Policy Perspective,2 that outlines the characteristics of wicked policy problems and draws out their implications for the public sector.
Examples of wicked problems that require changing behaviour include:
- Water resources. The sustainability of Australia’s water resources for agricultural, industrial and domestic use is under serious pressure. How to balance competing interests and ensure adequate supplies are hotly contested issues. The water-using behaviour of citizens and organisations is of key importance.
- Obesity. This is a complex and serious social health problem with multiple factors contributing to its rapid rate of growth over recent decades. How to successfully address obesity is subject to debate, but depends significantly on the motivation and behaviour of individuals and only modestly on the quality of secondary health care.
Even where the issue is not necessarily complex, it is often crucial that people get involved to achieve desired outcomes. This is clear, for example, in areas such as health and employment services. It has led to a focus on co-production (where the achievement of outcomes is seen as a joint responsibility of the government and the community) and citizen-centred services. While many services to the public are still evolving from the mass production model of earlier times, there is growing interest in public servants focusing ‘not only on the internal workings and efficiencies of existing services, but also on how people engage with those services, and how they can be mobilised, coached and encouraged to participate in the “common enterprise” of generating positive outcomes’.3 Increasingly, the delivery of services themselves is being made contingent on certain behaviours, for example, making some component of family welfare payments contingent on children’s school attendance.
(ii) Improving Cost-Effectiveness
Detailed cost-benefit analyses in a number of key areas of public policy, such as health and crime, have shown that behaviour-based interventions can be very much more cost-effective than traditional approaches to policy and service delivery. This is particularly the case if a longer-term time frame is taken to evaluate the constraints, costs and benefits. British research has demonstrated that smoking cessation programmes, for example, deliver around ten times more quality-adjusted life years per pound than expenditure on drugs to reduce cholesterol estimated over a 20-year time frame.4
With complex policy issues, agencies may have a greater impact on key policy outcomes by using their limited resources to develop more sophisticated and comprehensive approaches to changing the behaviour of users and other parties, than by concentrating on traditional policy tools and service delivery.
(iii) Other Benefits from Enhancing Personal Responsibility
The appropriate division of responsibility between the individual, the community and government has been and continues to be a controversial issue. Most people have strongly held views and it has been a key distinguishing philosophical issue among political parties. Regardless of the exact balance of responsibility between these components of society, a citizenry that actively cooperates to achieve key policy goals can:
- enable society to function with a less coercive regulatory and judicial system
- enable public goods and services to be provided with a lower tax burden
- enhance the quality of life of the whole community.
If citizens display greater restraint and understand the impact their behaviours have on themselves, their family and the environment, this can actively improve the social capital of communities.
It is not just in Australia that there has been a growing policy interest in engaging citizens to achieve sustained behavioural change. The UK Government, for example, has recently convened a Behaviour Change Forum which is led by the Cabinet Office, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Health, the Department for Transport, the Treasury, the Home Office, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and the Sustainable Development Commission. Its purpose is to:
- exchange experience of behavioural change policies and their implementation
- pool research and policy evaluation on behavioural change
- disseminate research findings and good practice across government
- advise on and promote common policy tools and support for those engaged in behaviour-focused policies.
The UK Behaviour Change Forum presents a wide range of information on its website, <www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/government/task-forces/behaviour-change.htm>, with its major focus being on sustainable development.
The Canadian Government has also been actively interested in the area of behavioural change and has produced a set of guidelines known as the ‘Tools of Change’ for altering public behaviour around complex problems in the environmental and health areas. These guidelines can be found at <www.toolsofchange.com>. One of the purposes of such websites is to provide case studies of behavioural change interventions so that the public sector can learn from experience and assess the efficacy of different measures for different situations.
One of the key learnings from international experience is that public sector agencies need to be mindful that behavioural change policy goals have to be reasonably congruent with a particular society’s views on the right balance between individual responsibility and government responsibility. These views vary according to policy area and over time. Public opinion regarding parental smacking of children, for example, is still fairly polarised with a significant proportion of society regarding government activity in this area as an unwarranted intrusion into the family sphere. Attitudes can change dramatically over time, however, and can be led and influenced by government measures. The overwhelming public support for the compulsory wearing of seatbelts, for instance, is far removed from the public resistance to its imposition in the 1970s.
1 M. Lewis 2007, States of Reason: Freedom, Responsibility and the Governing of Behaviour Change, Institute for Public Policy Research, London, p. 5.
2 Australian Public Service Commission 2007, Tackling Wicked Problems: A Public Policy Perspective <http://www.apsc.gov.au>
3 S. Parker and J. Heapy 2006, The Journey to the Interface: How Public Service Design Can Connect Users to Reform, Demos, London, p. 13.
4 D. Halpern et al 2004, Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: The State of Knowledge and Its Implications for Public Policy (UK Cabinet Office, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit), p. 10 <http://www.strategy.gov.uk>; D. Wanless 2002, Securing Our Future Health: Taking a Long-Term View (Review of the NHS for HM Treasury), cited in D. Halpern et al, Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour, p. 10.
