Beyond nudge: the contribution of this edited volume

Public policy and administration have undergone a behavioural turn within the last decade. The nine chapters of this edited volume further emphasise this development. As a starting point, we have argued that despite quickly evolving paradigms such as Behavioral Public Policy and Administration (BPP/ BPA), the utilisation of behavioural insights in policy making requires further conceptual and methodological refinement and robust empirical evidence (Moynihan 2018).

Regarding the impact of behavioural interventions, we suggest a behavioural model of the policy process, which recognises that the impact of behavioural interventions unfolds beyond the micro level. Individual actions influenced by behavioural policies produce relevant social outcomes at the meso and macro level. Significantly, these social outcomes have implications of greater scale than individual effects of behavioural approaches. Seen this way, behavioural approaches have political and societal consequences. For example, rather than causing merely individual behaviour change at the micro level, behavioural policies make a difference at the meso and macro level, for instance by altering people’s collective perceptions of social reality.

When designing and applying behavioural policies, these policies should always be understood as a result of political processes that include the influence of powerful interests and ideological frames. Even if behavioural policies are presented as a form of ‘evidence-based policy making’, the evidence production and frame is political. These insights advance the academic debate on behavioural policy making by contributing to the closing of the ‘great schism’ (Moynihan 2018) between micro and macro policies (Roberts 2020) and by adding social value and political embeddedness to the varieties of behavioural practices. Furthermore, it also enriches the debate on evidence based policy making with regards to its chances and limits in times of multiple crises, for example the climate crisis which we will discuss in more depth in this conclusion.

Insights emanating from our model support and accelerate the unfinished process of applying behavioural sciences in public policy and administration (Hallsworth and Kirkman 2020). This final chapter investigates the opportunities for applying our behavioural model of the policy process in three steps. First, we discuss how the model has been perceived by scholars of public policy and administration so far, in relation to which research topics and contexts.