Growing up in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, I remember Albania being geographically very close, just 150 kilometres across the sea from the harbour city of Brindisi. At the same time, closed and isolated by its communist regime, it seemed very far away. Many fleeing Albanians used small boats for the dangerous crossing to […]
The search for ways to design policies that help to solve societal problems is continuously evolving. The traditional evidence-based approach to policy making involves generating research results and using these to inform policy decisions. This blog post is based on an interview with Mikko Annala, Head of Governance Innovation at Demos Helsinki. It was originally posted on
A conversation about policy experiments Read More »
Is policymaking becoming too complex? What does this mean for evidence-informed policy making?
#Brexit, the populist surge and the crisis of complexity Read More »
After more than a decade in Asia working to build governments’ use of evidence, I recently moved back to Finland. Here I’ve found commitment to evidence and innovation like nowhere else. Kokeileva Suomi or Experimental Finland is a great example of the nation’s ‘readiness to innovate’. Set up by Prime Minister Juha Sipilä in 2015, it tests policies
Making research evidence count: insights from Finland’s Policy Analysis Unit Read More »
There is an interesting exchange mid-way through David Letterman’s interview to President Barack Obama on Netflix. Letterman asks President Obama about his reflection on policymaking and the role and power that the president actually has. Obama answer is quite illuminating in terms of the nature of policy change. Yes, he says, a lot of his time
Policy content change is one of the types of policy change, but not the only one Read More »
As I reread Duncan Green’s blog about an interesting conversation we had over a coffee few weeks ago in Brixton (How might a systems approach change the way aid supports the knowledge sector in Indonesia?), it occurred to me that I could add something. ‘Systems’, he writes, ‘evolve through the endless churn of variation, selection
The three components that can help system thinking in development programmes Read More »
by Tanty Nurhayati Djafar , Ni Wayan Suriastini , and Arnaldo Pellini Is it possible to calculate the return of investment on a research policy project? Well, the Indonesian think tank SurveyMETER and the Knowledge Sector Initiative have given it a go for a policy research project on services and infrastructure for the aging population in the Indonesian municipality of Balikpapan. Here is what
Estimating the return on investment of policy research and engagement Read More »
In June this year my family and I moved back to Europe after spending more than 10 years in Southeast Asia. We decided for various reason to move back to Finland. We have family and relatives here and one of the factors that brought us back was to be closer to the family. A second
First impressions from entering the best school system in the world Read More »