I found this article unclear about what you were talking about when you say “improving institutional decision making” (in policy). I think we can break this down into two very different things.
A: Improving improving the decision making processes and systems of accountability that policy institutions use to make decisions so that these institutions will more generally be better decision makers. (This is what I have always meant by and understood by the term “improving institutional decision making”, and what Jess talks about in her post you link to)
B: Having influence in a specific situation on the policy making process. (This is basically what people tend to call “lobbying” or sometimes “campaigning”.)
I felt that the DFID story and the three models were all focused on B: lobbying. The models were useful for thinking about how to do B well (assuming you know better than the policy makers what policy should be made). Theoretical advice on lobbying is a nice thing to have* if you are in the field (so thank you for writing them up, I may give them some thought in my upcoming work). And if you are trying to change A it would be useful to understand how to do B.
The models were not very useful for advising on how to do A: improving how institutions work generally. And A is where I would say the value lies.
I think the main point is just on how easy the article was to read. I found the article itself was very confusing as to if you were talking about A or B at many points.
*Also in general I think the field of lobbying is as one might say “more of an art than a science” and although a theoretical understanding of how it works is nice it is not super useful comapred to experience in the field in the specific country that you are in.
This post gives a nice framework, but the article should be half as long.
Also, I wonder how much can be learned from an abstract understanding here. Consider economists studying firms: they can learn some general principles, but they’re not in a position to go run a business (“if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”). Similarly, my prior is that studying institutional decision-making is not going to produce actionable knowledge that can be used in the real world. That would require learning about the specific problems facing (say) DFID.
Given the time it takes to form relationships with nodes in decision making networks, and the difficulty of reducing uncertainty from the outside, at some point it makes sense to either aim people at such jobs or to make friends with people in them. That lobbying and working in government aren’t unique tactics or roles in society doesn’t matter if they are neglected by those who are capable of pursuing similar goals: different organizations compete for influence in different directions. Early investment to enable direct interaction with decision making networks can be how you get the “when” right, figure out “who” to target, and sometimes even figure out the “what to improve” by seeing what is going wrong in the first place.
If an outside organization only does outside research and competitors invest more in making internal connections, the competitors gain advantage and influence with time. Even if one gains a more objective perspective by looking in from the outside and avoiding political fights, a lot of the most valuable information for decision making is going to be internal. This failure mode leads to forms of naivety that are persistent: external actors can see things that clearly look like mistakes, by actors with biases that are obvious to outsiders, and then conclude more confidently than is justified that their own views are correct.
I found this article unclear about what you were talking about when you say “improving institutional decision making” (in policy). I think we can break this down into two very different things.
A: Improving improving the decision making processes and systems of accountability that policy institutions use to make decisions so that these institutions will more generally be better decision makers. (This is what I have always meant by and understood by the term “improving institutional decision making”, and what Jess talks about in her post you link to)
B: Having influence in a specific situation on the policy making process. (This is basically what people tend to call “lobbying” or sometimes “campaigning”.)
I felt that the DFID story and the three models were all focused on B: lobbying. The models were useful for thinking about how to do B well (assuming you know better than the policy makers what policy should be made). Theoretical advice on lobbying is a nice thing to have* if you are in the field (so thank you for writing them up, I may give them some thought in my upcoming work). And if you are trying to change A it would be useful to understand how to do B.
The models were not very useful for advising on how to do A: improving how institutions work generally. And A is where I would say the value lies.
I think the main point is just on how easy the article was to read. I found the article itself was very confusing as to if you were talking about A or B at many points.
*Also in general I think the field of lobbying is as one might say “more of an art than a science” and although a theoretical understanding of how it works is nice it is not super useful comapred to experience in the field in the specific country that you are in.
This post gives a nice framework, but the article should be half as long.
Also, I wonder how much can be learned from an abstract understanding here. Consider economists studying firms: they can learn some general principles, but they’re not in a position to go run a business (“if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”). Similarly, my prior is that studying institutional decision-making is not going to produce actionable knowledge that can be used in the real world. That would require learning about the specific problems facing (say) DFID.
Given the time it takes to form relationships with nodes in decision making networks, and the difficulty of reducing uncertainty from the outside, at some point it makes sense to either aim people at such jobs or to make friends with people in them. That lobbying and working in government aren’t unique tactics or roles in society doesn’t matter if they are neglected by those who are capable of pursuing similar goals: different organizations compete for influence in different directions. Early investment to enable direct interaction with decision making networks can be how you get the “when” right, figure out “who” to target, and sometimes even figure out the “what to improve” by seeing what is going wrong in the first place.
If an outside organization only does outside research and competitors invest more in making internal connections, the competitors gain advantage and influence with time. Even if one gains a more objective perspective by looking in from the outside and avoiding political fights, a lot of the most valuable information for decision making is going to be internal. This failure mode leads to forms of naivety that are persistent: external actors can see things that clearly look like mistakes, by actors with biases that are obvious to outsiders, and then conclude more confidently than is justified that their own views are correct.