Context’ and ‘Evidence’ in Behavioural Insights: Critical Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Political Geography and Public Administration

This paper critically discusses the emerging Behavioural Insights movement within a growing number of governments. Our line of critical inquiry focuses on the limited forms of interdisciplinarity that characterize this movement, and its problematic epistemological assumptions. What we claim is missing is an engagement with the broader sweep of social sciences, which share similar concerns but very different analytical perspectives to those of Behavioural Insights. In this paper, we focus on specific contributions that are evident within our own disciplines of human geography and public administration. In our analysis, we focus on two central concepts: the geographical issue of context; and the public administration question of evidence. We aim to show how the bounded interdisciplinarity of Behavioural Insights has resulted in the production of understandings of context and evidence which severely limit the ontological assumptions and epistemological potential of the project. We furthermore assert that these interdisciplinary shortcomings hinder Behavioural Insights in delivering on its desire to develop a more thoroughly socialized account of the human condition.