Behavioural Change and Public Policy

In the past ten years, we can observe the global spread of behavioural change instruments as new modes of public policy. Behavioural teams and ‘nudging’ networks have been established across countries and at the European Commission in order to facilitate the application of insights from behavioural economics and psychology in different policy areas. The rise of behaviourally informed policies goes along with political debates on state-citizen relations (‘libertarian paternalism’) and economic debates on alternative measurements of progress (‘subjective well-being’). The aim of the workshop is to cover both, the impact of ‘behavioural governance’ and its normative implications. Based on an international and cross-sectoral perspective, the workshop focuses on key questions that have not been answered yet: What are the mechanisms behind the rise of behavioural economics over the past ten years? How can we describe and explain the diffusion of behavioural change instruments across countries and policy areas? In what ways are behavioural change instruments combined with existing tools of regulation and policy-making? What are the unintended consequences? Moreover: What is the role of organizations and networks (e.g. behavioural insights teams, nudging networks) in this? Can we observe new or different practices of “empirically informed regulation” (Sunstein)? How is this changing the ‘ecosystem of expertise’ in Europe and beyond? Finally: How does behaviourally informed policy change the relationship between science, politics and the public? In what ways has the debate on ‘libertarian paternalism’ changed the notion of the state? What are the consequences for macroeconomic discourses on welfare, wealth and inequality? The workshop extends the current discussion about the effectiveness of specific applications of behavioural change. Its purpose is to provide the building blocks for a comparative perspective on both, how behavioural approaches are changing public policies and in what ways they influence discourses on state, science, economy and society.