Making Creative Policy

SPIN 2005 is now into its third day, after the conference dinner at Brisbane's Rugby Club last night (not as strange as that may sound...). The day starts with a keynote session involving Kate Oakley (currently also an Adjunct Professor at QUT) and Rod Wissler from QUT. Kate starts off the session, speaking on 'evidence-based policy making'. She points to recent policy documents in the UK which provided a great deal of data about the success or failure of policies, but are remarkably non-convictional. Indeed, this is something of a reaction against the 'conviction politics' of the 1980s and 90s, and is driven also by greater international tranparency (and hence comparability). Partly because of this, citizens are also more demanding and less deferent to their experts and political leaders, and more directly in touch with evidence about policy outcomes (of which there is a greater supply). Ultimately, Kate points to something of an ideology of managerialism - so ideology hasn't vanished altogether in policy-making, but a new form of ideology has emerged here.

The problem with this is that, as Kate puts it, 'it doesn't stack up' - despite the availability of evidence, governments do still continue to ignore evidence that doesn't suit them (as in public policy dealing with crime, drugs, or indeed weapons of mass destruction). In addition, in this evidence-based environment the measurement and measurability of outcomes may drive what is done in the first place, and further there are methodological and power issues which may colour the evidence. Finally, cultural policy research presents another set of problems:

• we may ask whether cultural policy is simply playing an instrumentalist role
• it is sometimes difficult to delineate between advocacy and evidence
• there are training and HR issues, with researchers having poor research skills and therefore producing poor-quality evidence while on the other hands there are 'high priests' amongst researchers, expecting a very high level of quality in evidence gathering
• aggregation of evidence is problematic as it may combine very different and non-comparable sets of data
• especially in the creative industries field, there is still a paucity of data, and only short-term studies have been done to date

Nonetheless, evidence-based policy making remains important, to begin with simply for pragmatic reasons. Evidence-based work enables a learning by doing because direct responses are gathered and can feed back into current practice. There also still remains a need for more holistic measures for almost any kind of policy issue imaginable, and indeed many such new measures have been and are being introduced in recent times (Kate points to the environmental movement as an example here, which has provided many more measures of ecological destruction or improvement recently). Overall, there simply is a certain need to see evidence of the impact of public policy.