TY - UNPB
T1 - Behavioural public policy: past, present, and future
AU - Banerjee, Sanchayan
AU - John, Peter
PY - 2025/4/23
Y1 - 2025/4/23
N2 - Behavioural public policy (BPP) applies behavioural insights to aid policy-making and implementation. Emerging from the interest in nudges in the late 2000s, BPP has matured over the last decade and a half. It has produced new concepts and generated much empirical data, helping researchers and policy-makers understand and explain human behaviour with a multidisciplinary lens. Even though BPP is now an established field of endeavour, it is has now reached the point when it is important to assess how likely it is to grow as a field. To help understand the dynamics of knowledge innovation and utilisation, this article discusses the past, present, and future of behavioural public policy. We draw on the substantive achievements of nudge and BPP, the engagement of policy-makers in nudge units and behavioural policies, the growth of empiricism via experiments, and an emergent ethical concern illustrated by new tools, such as boost and nudge+. Responding to the critical dialogue around nudge, we highlight the increasingly prominent role that agency and reasonableness are likely to play in future initiatives. We outline benefits that newer methods, such as computational social sciences, may have on the field. BPP can make sense of heterogeneity while not losing its ability to design simple, low-cost population-based interventions.
AB - Behavioural public policy (BPP) applies behavioural insights to aid policy-making and implementation. Emerging from the interest in nudges in the late 2000s, BPP has matured over the last decade and a half. It has produced new concepts and generated much empirical data, helping researchers and policy-makers understand and explain human behaviour with a multidisciplinary lens. Even though BPP is now an established field of endeavour, it is has now reached the point when it is important to assess how likely it is to grow as a field. To help understand the dynamics of knowledge innovation and utilisation, this article discusses the past, present, and future of behavioural public policy. We draw on the substantive achievements of nudge and BPP, the engagement of policy-makers in nudge units and behavioural policies, the growth of empiricism via experiments, and an emergent ethical concern illustrated by new tools, such as boost and nudge+. Responding to the critical dialogue around nudge, we highlight the increasingly prominent role that agency and reasonableness are likely to play in future initiatives. We outline benefits that newer methods, such as computational social sciences, may have on the field. BPP can make sense of heterogeneity while not losing its ability to design simple, low-cost population-based interventions.
M3 - Preprint
BT - Behavioural public policy: past, present, and future
PB - Policy and Society
ER -