🏛️ The skill you never knew you needed: bureaucratic ethnography

Ministerial enthusiasm doesn't guarantee implementation

It was quite extraordinary. The report was about fixing Jamaica's environmental regulatory framework, and the minister responsible came to me after the launch and said ‘this report answers every question that I had about my portfolio. I intend to implement all the recommendations.’ And over the course of the next seven years, nothing happened. I mean just nothing. Not one single recommendation was implemented. The lesson that we took from it is that it's not enough to do good work. It's not enough to put great effort into ensuring you communicate that work in an understandable and persuasive way to both the policy maker and the stakeholders. It's not enough to get policymaker buy-in or even enthusiasm. You need to pay real attention to bureaucratic processes and power.

The concept of bureaucratic ethnography

Ethnography is about embedding yourself in an alien culture, and understanding the behaviours and actions and activities within that culture. And that is what those who want to influence policy need to do within the bureaucracies that they depend on for implementation. It's a herculean task because there is not a single culture and process across all public and state agencies. And so you need to understand who the influencers are, who is it that really has the ear of the person who's responsible for the implementation, or even the minister’s ear.

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Influencing work? It’s like being a parent

We are stuck in a job where it's difficult to know when we have influence and the extent of the influence. Even though sometimes you do have line of sight of the influence, you just can't be certain. 

There's an analogy to raising a child. Very often you're not entirely sure… I mean, which parent comes to the job feeling confident, especially with your first child, that you know what you're doing? If you think you know what you're doing, then you have a problem! The connection between what you're doing as a parent, and the outcome is difficult to measure, difficult to quantify. But you can't throw your hands up in the air and say, 'Well, I can't measure it. I can't quantify it. I don't know when I have influence, so I'm just going to give up.' 

It’s the same with policy work–most times you can't really tell when you have influence. You know, I had one former financial secretary in the ministry of finance mention to me some 10 years after the fact that a paper we wrote was transformative in shifting debt reduction strategy towards a focus on state enterprises. We had no idea for a decade.

Policy recommendations must be FAST

All of our recommendations are FAST. They need to be Feasible. We're not going to recommend that the government spend an amount of money on a problem that they don't have the revenue for, that they don't have the capacity to spend. It has to be Actionable. It has to be a policy lever that the policy maker can pull. So we can't recommend reducing waste in government because waste is not a line item allocation in the budget. It has to be Specific, so the policy maker knows exactly what to do. And it has to be Targeted. It has to say who is the actor, who is the person to pull the lever.

Communications is as important as research

We spend as much time, effort, resources and dedicated staff to communications as we do to the research. The truth is that for most think tanks and most questions, the research is straightforward. The research is not difficult. The difficult part is getting it into people's heads. Think tanks generally have too much faith in the raw power of the idea and they think that in the public sphere good ideas will naturally get traction. And it's just not true, as evidenced by the politics and election results of hundreds of countries.

So, get yourself a strong communications director

My explanation to our communications lead is that while I'm your titular boss as the executive director, when it comes down to the function of communication, you are my boss... You're in charge of communications. So you must tell me what I need to do so that we have good communications. I don't have the freedom to say no. If you can’t do that as the executive director, then you’ve made a bad hire and you should fix that, or you need to resign from the job and get replaced by someone who will listen to the experts that they hire.

Real influence

The real highlight is, you know, going to the supermarket and the security guard at the entrance addresses me with a line or a comment or a conclusion from the report that we launched the day before... we did a report on the source of public debt and therefore what is the way to address it. And the security guard said to me, “You know, I'm really surprised, sir, that that is where the debt came from.”

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