Interdisciplinary Public Policy
It is by now hopefully well understood that many contemporary public policy challenges – climate change, poverty, crime, among many others – do not fall neatly within the boundaries of one discipline. Our collective ability to address such challenges requires us to integrate disciplinary understandings – and also to bridge the gap between the academy, the public, and policy-makers.
The i2S website contains a host of detailed advice on how to blend the twin challenges of integrating across disciplines and interacting with policymakers. Perhaps the single greatest piece of advice is for regular interaction with policy-makers: they are much more likely to be interested in research results if that research was guided in the first place by an understanding of the precise challenges and constraints faced by policymakers. The "About Interdisciplinarity" pages on the AIS website also address public policy.
We can stress a few other key points here:
Interdisciplinary strategies can be useful not just in determining how best to achieve public policy goals but in setting those goals in the first place. The latter task will often involve integrating across differences in values as well as differences in scholarly insights. Integrating across values is a greater challenge to be sure. But we can potentially seek to understand and respect diverse values. We can seek to find some common ground when values disagree.
Policymakers often receive advice from disciplinary experts. This advice is not wrong but incomplete. Interdisciplinary advice that integrates the best elements of disciplinary advice can potentially yield superior policy outcomes. In any complex public policy problem, involving interactions among multiple phenomena, a good starting assumption is that insights from multiple disciplines, theories, and methods will be valuable.
In particular, interdisciplinary analysis can potentially reduce the incidence of side-effects. Policies introduced to achieve one goal are often found to have negative effects on other goals. Arguably, the greatest single problem with public policy analysis, and the one that encourages nihilism the most, is that negative side effects of policies are often not predicted in advance. There is thus a popular sense that each policy just generates a new set of problems. To be sure, humans have limited foresight, and thus it is not possible to predict all possible side effects. However, analysts could greatly increase their record in this respect through recourse to an extensive mapping exercise. Mapping is a key step in the interdisciplinary research process. But it deserves special attention in policy analysis. Policy analysts should ask which phenomena are implicated and how negative effects on each of these might be mitigated. In some cases, negative side effects may be so unavoidable and large that the policy in question is inadvisable even if it addresses the original policy challenge. A second major challenge in public policy is that policies are not routinely evaluated after implementation (in part because those who benefit from the policy urge its continuation): interdisciplinary policy analysts should urge a comprehensive analysis of all impacts of a policy, with an expectation that the policy should be revised to mitigate unanticipated side effects. Complex public policy problems are unfortunately often (though not necessarily) liable to require complex solutions: a set of policies that act primarily on different phenomena. When some side effects are unavoidable, policymakers need to revisit the analysis of policy goals: We can strive for some degree of consensus on the tradeoffs the public is willing to make between conflicting goals.
Policymakers want solutions to particular problems. Academics are often more interested in generalizations. This difference in goals can present challenges in (especially transdisciplinary) policy-oriented research. But there are many examples of succesful research that was of interest both to academics and policymakers.