📜 Reverse engineer policy from practice

If you’re going to get large-scale change you often have to interact at different points of the system: investors, on the ground, and policy. That’s our theory of change at Nesta – it’s nice to be just actually doing it. One example is a direct partnership with a supermarket brand trying to figure out how they can make their stores more nutritious, and working with investors to align behind a single metric to push all stores to do that, and then working with government to mandate that metric.

We’re trying to be cognisant of all the bear traps around different debates and then work within those political constraints. So you don’t choose something that everyone understands can be politically weaponised, you choose something that may be a little bit more technocratic but can be a super effective mandatory target.

What annoys me sometimes is that people go to the first best solution. So, for example, the answer to climate change is that we should have a carbon price across the whole world that will drive investment into the most effective ways to reduce carbon. Of course, that’s the first best answer that an economist would come up with within three seconds. But it’s lazy to then say ‘unless they can do my first best answer, the politicians are just useless.’ There are usually third best solutions that are also good, that have a massive impact. The creativity is in thinking ‘What is a policy instrument that is also politically savvy?’

I don’t think think tanks have had as much influence as you might imagine. If I think about how many ideas really made their way from think tanks to government when I was in government, it was very very few. Once government has resources assigned and sets up good strategy units and policymaking operators, the degree of rigour and knowledge you can have inside is massively greater. It’s interesting to compare UK think tanks with think tanks in America which are obviously much better funded. It’s more of a domain where people are zigzagging in and out. So you leave government, you go back to think tanks, you stick around there, and then you go back in because you’ve got that greater interchange with the civil service. They are more robust.