 But here we are the last week. I want to finish up talking about policy evaluations. Before we get to the fun last Thursday, I'm going to turn to the subject of future challenges facing public policy. Most of which I think really clears directly off of this discussion about evaluation and how we deal with the possibility of policy failure and how we can assess the policy success. I want to pick up where we left off Thursday last while talking about what we have learned about policy success, what can be done to make policies work better. Obviously, in looking through these admonishments, they're all pretty complicated. If they were easy, we probably wouldn't have policy failure. They're a constant struggle. They're a constant need for reconciling a lot of things that are really very, very difficult to achieve without a ballot. But the key is that we need to design policies, and we realize this. A lot of people in the policy community realize it. We need to design policies adaptively. We need to encompass the possibility that they will fail. And if that's true, then we have to embrace temporal, spatial, perceptual, and goal-based failures right at the beginning. We began talking about some of the ways we can do this, and we'll use some examples of situations where they have actually been used. But I want to revisit these because they really are very difficult things to do. Huge political challenges. This notion of error-provocative design. Bruce Ackerman and Frank Robison back in the 80s and 90s did some of the earliest work on this subject of error-provocative design. These are scholars that are particularly interested in technology policies. Or policies that have technological or scientific implications, which could range all the way from the space program, we talked about last week, to energy policy, to nutrition, public health policies. And an error-provocative design assumes again that failure is probably inevitable at some level. And so what we want to do is, given the interest through pressures in the design of policies, and the fact that policies are often racially created, is you want to prepare for these flaws by providing checks and balances. What does checks and balances mean? Well, we think of checks and balances going way back to the beginning of the course. In democratic policymaking as meaning that government itself is structured in such a way that different interests can check and balance the power of other interests that's integral to the American system of politics. But this is something else. This is something much deeper. This is saying, not checks and balances within the government or within the political process, it's saying within the policy, within the actual law, regulation, program, what have you, that at the first sign of a problem, a street level bureaucrat can actually intervene to veto a decision, to in fact oversee or overturn something that his or her boss may have decided to demand some problem be inspected, audited, examined, evaluated, and revisited. And in addition to the checks and balances that permit input from a wide range of people outside of the policy, the consumers, you as the subject of the policy can actually complain, not just lodge a complaint, but actually have some authority to make sure that the policy is revisited or modified in some way. This is a huge leap of faith for the way public policies are usually made. Before I go any further, let me just ask some more rhetorical question. Would these be easy things to implement? Could you imagine most organizations in the public sector saying, oh sure, we'll design a policy so that anyone can be a whistleblower, talk with the expression whistleblower? We embrace that. We welcome that. Go ahead and rat us out. What do you think? These things that are pretty difficult to achieve? It's not always common sense, but it's probably a mistake. Why is it a mistake? Organizations don't like to admit they make mistakes, right? It's a sign of failure. If you fail, then it usually means that your budget might be subject to reduction, or somebody's career might be on the line. Any other reasons? How policy organizations work together? I think that actually public policy itself has a relatively short history, so it still needs some kind of full information. We don't know how it works and what kind of consideration we have to consider yet. I think now it's kind of in the beginning of the stage. As time goes by, I'm thinking that we may have a chance to develop a full idea, and then maybe public policy can eventually succeed. Yeah, I think that's right. All of this connotes, and I think this is what we drive again, a very important point, all of this connotes a sharing of power and authority. It's not just ratting out your boss or vetoing the decision made by your organization. It's sharing power. It's sharing power with people within an organization at lower rungs of the policy organization, again that expression is three-level bureaucrat. It's sharing authority with the public, and we'll come back to this issue of public participation later today because this is a very huge challenge in all areas of public policy worldwide. So it's sharing authority, and it's also sharing responsibility for implementing a policy. That implementing a policy is not simply the responsibility of the government. It's the responsibility of everybody involved in the process of instituting it. It's a very difficult set of challenges. So you get the picture. This is what you need to do to ensure that policies succeed. We are, I think you're correct, only at the beginning of an era when this is becoming expected, demanded. This notion of accountability, and it's a huge set of political challenges, and it's going to remain a set of political challenges well into the future. We'll come back to this future business in a little bit, but I think this is really the cusp of some of the greatest challenges facing us. Let me mention one other thing that makes this difficult in addition to this notion of shared authority. At some level, and we're going to come back to this in a little bit in more detail, worldwide, and this is one of the points that Ellis makes in his reading in Chapter 7, worldwide policy makers are facing a real dilemma. The dilemma is that more and more people are demanding more and more from the state, more and more from government. We want to live in a safe society, in a more risk-free society, in a society that provides greater benefits, not just basic needs, but of the quality of our lives. These are things that we seem to be demanding more and more and more of worldwide as we become more modernized, more sophisticated as the revolution of rising expectations spreads. We see this right in the Middle East now. These are not just political debates, they're policy debates. They're not just people saying they want to share power for the government. They're saying they want benefits from the government, jobs, education, housing, healthcare, etc. As these things increase and the pressures to produce increase, what it means is that all of the possibilities for policies to failure multiply, because there's less tolerance, less patience for waiting for things to work, waiting for the ship to turn. You see this, not just in the Middle East, we see the United States in a lot of respects. The fluctuation of support for government in election cycles that are only two years in length. We voted in and we waited for all these changes and gosh, 24 months have gone by and nothing's happened. This lack of patience. On the one hand you have the problem of shared authority, on the other hand you have a lack of patience and multiplicative demands which create more opportunities for failure. So we'll come back to those issues separately in a little bit when I want to spell these out. Questions about this, comments about this? Well related to the whole, you know, what I'm going to say up front is probably the bail issue. I mean I think that just caused this issue when you have certain actors just pursuing power and how are they going to get buy-in if they're starting to get insane, they're going to fail. I think that would require like, you know... Humility? Yeah. And you know, I actually, I mean I definitely think it would be, I don't know if you can see it with politicians but I think people would probably like that. So this isn't a riddle, this is an effort that kind of reconciled in what we know and again it gets a little ahead of ourselves when we look at this and we talk about challenges to policy but as students of planning and of policy of social science background if you do an experiment and you find that your results by an experiment I mean more broadly just collecting information on the problem and you find that your assumptions didn't quite play out you were in error and you found that the data contradicted what you initially hypothesized. Is that a failure? No, it's not a failure, right? In fact it's a success, it means that you did a good job in your science. Does that work in politics? Does that make reasoning work in the policy world? You know what, you guys elected me and I went to Washington and I thought everything was going to work this way and I was completely wrong and I just wanted you to know that and I want you to be like, that doesn't work. The dilemma between science and politics, this is one of the better future challenges. How do you create a public savvy about the science to accept this paradigm? Because that's what it takes. It takes basically not just a change in the policymaker establishment it takes a change in the public to tolerate the idea that failure is not necessarily a bad thing that policy is an effect of a set of experiments in the matter of speaking itself. In science when we have these failed hypotheses it's really sort of an opportunity to look at sometimes it's the case of some unknown phenomenon that came to life because of this jail hypothesis which makes it an opportunity to learn more about what's really going on and whatever social phenomenon. We don't really use that approach in politics at all when we have a failed policy it's an opportunity to see if people visually see something more going on because they're not addressing it. Yeah, that's right and also as we'll see momentarily one of the dilemmas too is that policy as social scientists and as planners when we go out and we collect information about a problem and we found that what we thought we would find isn't true what's at stake? Our term paper, our article for publication what's at stake in a policy about much more? Let me push on to some concluding observations about policy and failure and success Are there examples of error provocative design? There are a few. I give you four which we can discuss. They all have some commonalities. The biggest commonality is that they all came about because something went dreadfully wrong There must be a lesson there somewhere. NASA manned space flight missions. Since the space shuttle accidents, Challenger and Columbia there have been changes in procedure in NASA which have been practiced over the years among other things in fact in the launch of the space shuttle the lowest level launch official some engineer walking around the launch pad and here she sees something wrong he can cancel the launch that's something that wouldn't have gone on years ago and there's no retribution. The idea is that that person has a body of knowledge and knows something and is familiar with the operations and the system and how things function that he can wave off. Same thing with the shuttle lands. Nope, can't land in Florida. Too rainy. You have to land at Edwards Air Force Base, North of LA That's a decision at a low level official. FEMA since Hurricane Katrina which is one of the greatest, not only one of the greatest natural disasters in the 21st and 20th centuries really collectively but also one of the greatest policy failures of our time. FEMA really blew it on every level. The entire concept of street level bureaucracy failed. People in Washington had absolutely no idea and didn't monitor and didn't get information from basically cut off information from people. Disregarded, we know what's going on over there. We've been through this before. We've been through this so many times. We're experts. We're masters of this. FEMA has now begun to change its tune. Decision making is much more decentralized and there's much more effort made in contingency plan. FEMA officials in local areas work much more closely with local government and state government officials than used to be the case before Hurricane Katrina. Will it pay off? We won't know for sure until the next similar disaster comes along. Last year the oil spilled in the gulf. The Department of the Interior has a bureau called the Mining and Mineral Service. We talked a little bit about the dilemma that this service conflated implementation and evaluation. They were supposed to implement safety regulations and they were also doing the policy evaluation. And in fact, worse, they actually turned over the implementation to the people that they were supposed to be policing. They love the industry that they used themselves. It's a classic problem in bureaucracies and this has since changed. Now, in fact, they're much more closely monitoring situations. They have the ability, again, to veto decisions of their bosses if they think there's a real problem. They can go right to the secretarial level within the Department of the Interior. Again, we won't know how long this has worked until the next problem that we face comes along but we have good reason to believe that they've learned. I alluded to Three Mile Island, a nuclear accident many, many decades ago that actually did change energy policy in the United States for better or for worse. There has been no nuclear power plant licensed since 1979. Public opposition is too high. So nuclear power is an option to deal with things like global climate change. It doesn't seem to be very resonant in the United States. It's a good thing or a bad thing as you decide. But every nuclear power plant that's operating was licensed before 1979. We're in the one down the coast here in Santa Norfolk. If you drive by, you should go to San Diego. But the NRC has changed its policies. NRC inspectors can shut down a nuclear power plant at the first sign of a problem. And the problem doesn't have to be an operational problem. It can be a problem in environmental report. They can read a document that hasn't been filed properly or shows a lack of inspection and they can shut down the plant. It creates a lot of inconvenience perhaps for utilities as well as customers but better safe than sorry. Common denominators, well I could extend this list to another page if I wanted to but I think this kind of makes the point. Yes, now we have policies and agencies that carry out these policies that are more adaptive. Why? Because of scandal. Somebody did something wrong, a conflict of interest. Because of an accident, because of a tragedy, a loss of life, a high consequence failure. And I think this is very important to keep in mind. It cannot be understated. Because what it says is that policy can change but unfortunately we don't see a lot of examples of policy changing for long term planning or anticipation. It's usually a failure that prompts or precipitates a change in organizational procedure, policy process, and policy culture. And I wish I could point to you and say, oh I know examples of where we haven't had these great failures, losses of property in life. This guy has learned that we don't have those attempts. It seems to be the result of a high profile failure where something really bad happens. Or nearly bad enough happens. It was bad enough. We don't know if anyone lost their life in Tree Model Island. It may take years before we know what the health effects of that near accident will be. Questions? How do you recognize that in the state level, the issues around education policy and things where term limits just inevitably cut us off in the past because of this temporal dichotomy. So I don't know, I don't know how you way is it better to leave people in office for a longer period of time to get things done in a longer way, not being able to get someone out? That's a very good question. That's one of the policy conundrums that we get into with public participation. Opponents of term limits argue that government can only really learn when you have people around for a long time that gain experience and through that experience can then make better decisions over time. Getting back to the quandary of impatience that I alluded to a few minutes ago, what we see happening is the demand for term limits. Well, if somebody is trying to sacramental and they promise they're going to do all this talk and then they go, then they just want to get reelected, then they keep doing these stupid things and get us deeper and deeper into debt, don't make good decisions. The only way we can solve this is to put limits on government. That's a very American trait, by the way. It's an impulse on a positive side. It's an impulse toward democratic accountability. It says we don't want political leaders to be given a long leash. We want to be able to restrain them and control periodically in American society and other developed democracies. You have this impulse to control or rein in political officials. What that leads to are things like term limits, initiative elections, referenda on policy, things that in fact create greater accountability that may undermine wisdom and experience. That's kind of where we are. I mean, that's not likely to change. On the other hand, in fairness, looking at legislatures, they do have staffs and those staffs do have an institutional memory and they're around for a long time. If you've been to Sacramento, those of you who have the opportunity to work at UC SAC Center, internships or friends that have done this, frequently you'll work with staff members that have been there for many, many years and they know the terrain, they know the territory and these people are trusted even by short-term legislators. The legislators do look at these people and say, you know, what about this budget thing? What did we do in 1994? How is this a different situation? What can we learn from it? So it's not often as hugely terrible as we think it is. I mean, you can adapt. Well, the reason I asked my actual manager, her name is, she's been a policy consultant for 10 years in education and she's just left a good job with the corporation and it's really struggling because she's really felt committed to politics but she just had to go because she couldn't get anything done. She was an education and she would watch that come and go with the big hurrah around the new lawmaker and what they do to get elected and the promises they make and then have to go for all that, even though she was a constant, she still felt, I mean, she did things with someone else. I like Winston Churchill's great quote. I mean, many, many decades ago, late in his political career, he said, you know, democracy is the worst of all forms of government except for all of the others that come along from time to time. It's also a story about Churchill that I like. A young candidate for parliament running for elections, a member of parliament came to Churchill, said, I've been wanting to meet you for years. You've inspired me. I just want to be like you. Here are all the things I want to do. I'm enumerating all these policy changes he wants to institute. I want to do this on health and I want to do this on environment. I want to do this on foreign policy and I just want to do all these things. What should I do first? Churchill turned to him and said, well, I think you should get yourself elected. All right. So, let's look at some future challenges in this context and see if we can tie some of this together. So, three basic claims. When we talk about challenges in public policy, you know, we can enumerate hundreds of them obviously. But in the context of what we talk about in this course in terms of the policy process, how decisions have been made, how it came back to the very beginning, he says together, let me suggest three big challenges. And I think this is underscored by the readings for this week as well. Let me make the, let me kind of spell out this first assertion a little bit. Worldwide, we do see evidence that as nation states develop, aspirations for a better life are grown. And this is a worldwide trend. There's lots of data to support this. Expectations are rising. This is true in developing countries. This is true in well-developed countries. This is true in nation states that have democratic political systems with lots of participation. It's true in less-developed colonies that are still struggling with providing some sort of political order. But I think it's still a valid statement. And as a result, problems, policy problems, and I should really say policy problems and solutions are kind of converging. They're kind of converging and kind of coming together in a number of remarkable ways. Two major ways. First of all, and this is something that's underscored by Levin Shapiro, problems are becoming more comparable to the world over. I mean, we're seeing it in transatlantic states. We're seeing it in Europe and North America. But we're even seeing it in less-developed regions of the world. Healthcare is something that is more and more being demanded. A state wall in providing healthcare. We talked about healthcare weeks ago. I know, but as populations age, and as more people come around in populations, there's more demands for healthcare. There's also demands for more rights for various things. As countries modernize. And what's very interesting, and I think the reading makes a very profound observation about this, how we define rights is becoming an evolutionary process. It used to be that as countries modernized, we would define rights as sort of things that we want the government to leave us alone about. The right to speak our mind. The right to print or write what we want. The right to practice a faith as we wish without somebody telling us what we can and can't believe. The right to express ourselves. Liberty. Rights from the state. Public policy in terms of rights met. Get out of our homes. Get out of our private lives. Leave us alone. Let us express ourselves. Speak, write, believe, practice what we wish so long as we're not harming anyone else in the process. Rights were defined in this very sort of minimal way. Now rights are becoming defined as things like, I have a right to healthcare. I have a right to a clean environment. I have a right to education. This is not something that would simply be nice to have. I've got to have it, or I'm not going to get ahead. In my field of environmental policy, it's remarkable to see things like the argument that water is a right. That's a growing rule. It has a lot of merit, quite frankly. You can't do much if you can't have water. You can't live very long. But the notion that these things are rights and of course the subsequent demands that follow this emergence of rights and this emergence of greater needs demands for more what we would call cradle to grave protections. From the moment we come into this world to the moment we leave or even thereafter, we expect as economies become more complex that political systems must provide policies in many, many, many areas. These things are in fact leading to getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, but in principle they're leading to the notion of a thicker state worldwide. As countries modernize, the demands will be that there be more layers of public policy, more things that government is called upon to do, greater demands for more and more and more. That's one big convergence. But there's another which has kind of opposite or conflicting tendencies and that is that solutions are becoming comparably constrained. We want more and more and more but there is also less revenue as economies change and become more complex. The ability of policies to enact public policies that will do all of these things become severely constrained both because there are so many demands that all of them can't equally be met within the constraints of revenues that are generated for taxes or fees or funds or whatever. And if policymakers don't respond to these demands effectively enough, there tends to be, as both Ellis and Levin and Shapiro point out and others that we look at this quarter, greater stress placed on policymakers. There tends to be a reduction of trust and a lack of confidence in policy processes. It's an irony. We talked about term limits. One of the ironies is that as demands for more and more from the state grow, more effectiveness, more satisfaction of rights, more provision of protections of various sorts, we have less and less confidence and trust in the ability of the state to do these things well or to do them at all. It's a dilemma. It's a global dilemma. And it also is exacerbated by the fact that revenues and I might say other resources are limited. So here we are. Good place to be. This is a big set of challenges, questions and comments about this. What do we do? Throw up our hands and say, boy, I'm glad this course is over. What do we do about this? What do we do? Not necessarily a solution, but maybe what not to do would be the example that you talked about in the water policy class about Bolivia's privatization. I mean, they were facing pressures not from their people so much as from international organizations like the World Bank. They made a not very good policy, a decision in privatizing. So I guess just look at examples like that. Yeah, and what do you think do examples like that tell us? I think that is a good example and a number of layers. I mean, one thing it tells me is that governments need to listen to their people, which sounds kind of trivial, but not so trivial. Yes, as we globalize, there are more demands, particularly in the developing nations, to listen to international organizations that control economic streams and control the transference of aid and diffuse innovations and so forth, but it really does kind of go back to old-fashioned retail politics. First, listen to your population. Listen to what your people are telling you, not what somebody that doesn't even reside in your policy tells you. What else does it tell us? That the government should be controlling a lot or not a lot, but should be controlling services such as water provision in some countries and that the type of market hasn't developed. So water is a right, at least in the opinion of many people. Government has an obligation to provide this service. Does it say anything about how the service should be provided or what the government, what the policy makers need to do? Does it say anything about participation? Does it suggest anything about maybe the need for... It's a good example and we'll come back to some of the implications in that little bit later and talk about public participation. Yeah. Other comments or questions? So these are sort of some big challenges. So what are some implications? Well, a couple of big implications that can be seen if you park them back to a lot of the case studies we've looked at this quarterly. Let me first make a distinction, again, between developing and more developed politics. So we can sort of have a baseline or understand what's going on. In developing countries, one of the policy implications is that there are greater demands for public participation in decisions. I mean, the example of Bolivia and water would be a great example of this. The example of what's happening in the Middle East. Again, it's not just clamoring for democracy, whatever that means. It's participation in decisions that affect people's lives. Less tolerance for authoritarian policy making. Why has to be a really fascinating phenomenon. The notion that, and we'll come back to this a little bit later, the notion that people in the state are experts, they know what to do. Leave it to them. They'll figure it out. They know what we need is becoming less acceptable. Greater demands for participation, less tolerance for authoritarian decision making. It is interesting looking at this from a kind of broad historical context. One never knows how these things will play out, obviously, over time, and the differences in how they'll play out. But when you look at what's going on in the Middle East, you look at the stirrings that are occurring in China. In terms of the government, not the same, it has a problem of corruption. And it understands that there's not a big tolerance among the public for incompetence and we really need to address these issues. What's kind of lurking beneath the surface? Very similar things occurred in Europe and in North America for centuries. The American Revolution was, in effect, a revolution in which people said we want more public participation in decisions with no taxation without representation as a policy statement. And less tolerance for kings and queens and monarchs and distant authoritarian leaders making policy. We want those things to be in our own hands. So this seems to be a more global phenomenon that happens at certain times. And then the second point, in more developed countries, less trust of experts and of an expert state. Greater movement by groups and parties for the center of the political spectrum. I want to elaborate on that a little bit. One of the interesting things that I think is a dilemma, paradoxical if you will, is that in developing countries where you've not had a big history of participation in policy making and you have had authoritarian traditions for long periods of time, one of the concerns is that political systems will move toward extremes. There'll be a rush of demands. There may be a very, very liberal kind of a polity that takes control or very conservative and even oppressive polity that takes control. In developed countries, there's a kind of a different phenomenon that's going on. We see it in both Europe and the United States and in Japan and in other developed countries. And that is greater movement by interest groups and political parties away, away from partisan extremes. Parties themselves might not want to admit that. You see this debate going on in Congress fighting the last war. But in fact, the public is pretty sick and tired of it. What they're saying is we want movement toward the center for solutions. And what do I mean by the center? Well, by the center, I mean things like we want the government to do all this stuff but we want it to be done with less red tape, less regulation. More partnership with civil society. We want more innovative solutions that don't just say, this can be done by the state, this can be done by people. The state and citizens need to work together in creative ways to get things done. Greater devolution of the implementation policy from the national level to lower jurisdictions. We see this dilemma in education. We see it in healthcare. We see it in the environment. And finally, more incremental or path dependent solutions. Healthcare in the United States would be a good example. We don't want revolutionary or radical innovations. No more new deals. No more new frontiers. No more wars on whatever. Let's not make war on anything. Let's just do something incremental. Let's see if it works. If not, let's move on to something else. Let's be pragmatic. It's very interesting in 2008, Mr. Obama, I think, in part won election because he was very persuasive toward the center of the electorate in convincing people that whatever solutions would need to be adopted to address issues of healthcare, the economy of foreign policy would need to be found in a centrist view. That one of the criticisms of Mr. Obama, as you know, is that he ran as a centrist and people charge moved maybe to the left, to the liberal base of his party. That may or may not be true, but let me share with you the notion that that's not a unique criticism. Mr. Bush back in 2000 ran as a centrist on education policies and so forth and then clearly moved to the right. So this seems to be kind of a phenomenon that's constant in policy models. But more incremental or path-developed innovation and then finally, this last sub-bullet, greater demands for policy thickening and less risk. So at the very same time we talk about moving to the center becoming less radical, more path-dependent, we still are extremely concerned with issues of environmental protection, health and education, consumer product safety. There has been a relentless growth in these policy areas and there is not any likelihood that these concerns will shrink or diminish. In fact, in some ways they've grown into areas that only a few years ago we never could have imagined they could have gone into. Things like a v-chip on your television so you can impede the risk of children being exposed to certain kinds of programs and that would be the role of the government to provide that policy remedy. And it would have the consensus of people and almost throughout the political spectrum. Those who identify themselves as conservatives will say that's good because it's freedom of choice. I can determine what my kids will multiply and people on the left could say this is good because it's the government that's providing this service because the market won't provide it. Cable companies wouldn't provide this voluntarily unless we stepped in and said you've got to do this. Questions or comments? Just to get that straight so you say in developing countries there's less tolerance for authority in policy making but do they accept experts or they trust experts? Is that correct? That's a good question. No, I think the same lack of trust for the expertise crosses over. What plays out differently is the authoritarianism. The authoritarian tradition is something that still persists in developing countries so as a result the rejection of authoritarianism that we see spreading is a kind of new phenomenon. How does that play out in terms of respect for experts or trust of experts? I think it's playing out much the same way in developing countries which is to say a skepticism toward totally expert solutions and trust in people who through education or experience consider themselves to be experts. Which makes for a common denominator that we'll get to in a little bit and that is the common denominator of participation in public participation. Spurred different causes but same set of consequences more direct public involvement in policy decision making. Does that apply mainly to international aid efforts when they try to modernize developed countries like foreign countries? Yes, exactly right and this is something that's also embedded in this change. Foreign assistance had often been viewed as a kind of paternalism in which it's not just that more developed countries are providing the resources for improvements to healthcare improvements to sanitation improvements to community life improvements to education and so forth but there were strings attached. It was if you take our assistance you're also going to get our expertise and you're also going to get our authority. We're going to tell you how to do this because you don't really know how to do it and we'll teach you how to do it but then at what point do you say you know how to do it, we'll leave it or at what point do you continue the strings. This is sort of what happened in Bolivia and it's sort of what continues to happen in foreign aid programs today and by developing countries you know it's interesting how this is played out in media. It looks like a lack of appreciation. We don't even appreciate all of the aid that we've given. Well, yes they appreciate it but would you appreciate it if someone came in and provided education and said, and you owe me and I owe you and I'm going to tell you what to do for the rest of your life and I'm going to control the strings of your public policies. And that's kind of where the result is. It's the same resistance to expertise again, authoritarians and you see this playing out in current activities you know what role does the United States play in promoting revolution. It's a very delicate balance. On the one hand you could say well you want to support the changes because they'll lead to more democracy. On the other hand if you intervene too actively then you can be criticized for intervening interfering rather than letting it play out in its own direction. Well in one example where it wasn't even so much that it was an intervention that was supposed to, or that was trying to interfere, it was aid in medical supplies because kind of ruined their entire healthcare system because there's so many people offering free healthcare through aid organizations that the people who actually are doctors living in that country can't set up their practices who would pay for it. It's an excellent point and that comes back to the unanticipated consequences of these kinds of changes. Let me give you another example. Some of you are familiar with this. 80 devastating or quick year ago. At least 300,000 people were killed. We don't really know for sure. Millions of people homeless. Portal prints of the capital in the major city continues to be devastated people are living in camps. Big problem. How do you recover from a disaster long term recovery methods is that people have to have a supply of dependable fresh water that they can maintain and supply for themselves and food. So what are international aid organizations doing? What have they been doing? Well, the United States, the agency for international development has been providing a lot of grain to Haiti. But not a lot of seeds and implements to plant crops to engage in agriculture to reforest to do all of these things that would lead to a self-sufficient economy. It's well intended. But what's happening is we're getting rid of our surplus food which keeps prices high in the United States so that the farmers are happy agribusiness is happy We're, yes, feeding people but are we building capacity in London? And a lot of aid organizations have said enough are we don't want Yes, emergency food of course that's needed now the next step is plant crops become self-sufficient and that's how you build longer capacity for recovery So it's another example Other questions? I just want to add that I still just keep coming back to this what in the world or is this going to look like in terms of just the internet technology and how, especially research because I work in applied research and so you see a lot of investigators and informatic specialists to do planning and research ideas especially relative to like genetics and super scientific futuristic things and because they go when they eat from America they do things I think and create systems that are going to you know provide information or legs up because of the internet and clearly many of these sorts of policy innovations I don't kind of relate to the internet but I just feel like if we keep this bureaucracy and are the demolition of the way it is it's like a slow process and the information and the research is coming out so fast I don't know how it's going to get recognized Yeah, and I'm not sure anybody really knows right now what the trajectory will be but one of the things that we know is that it exacerbates worsens, makes more apparent this revolution rising expectations and probably the convergence that we can find whereas these things used to take years, maybe decades to occur, they're now occurring in weeks and months so there does seem to be a compression The system just seemed to be a classifier structure Yeah so these are kind of accelerating so we have some challenges we have some implications so what are the problems what is the problem so a riddle didn't want it to be a riddle but it is we're simultaneously demanding less harm and greater protection it's a worldwide phenomenon that implies more government more policy more thickening of the state more and more of more but at the same time as Ellis and others point out we're concerned with a fair allocation of benefits and risks I want a higher quality of life that means I want to be protected but I don't want you to tell me how to live my life and I don't want you to interfere with my privacy and I want my freedom and my liberty that applies less in some of them we want more but we want less in turn these twin objectives I'm not going to leave you with the conclusion necessarily that they are inherently contradictory maybe they're not let's leave that open on the surface they certainly seem difficult to reconcile but that doesn't mean that they're inherently contradictory nevertheless what they do require is a greater reliance on science well if we're going to provide less risk a reduction of hazard greater protection greater levels of nutrition greater levels of environmental protection safer and cleaner water better food supply more and more of all these good things these reductions of risk we're going to need good science science and policy have to work together as allies right everybody's with that everybody likes science okay good all right but also an allowance for public participation do those two things fit together very well let's see what's a good science let's take a vote on it determine what the public thinks a good science is no that's not quite the way science is it's not a question of what people vote on what the majority says 400 years ago the majority said the world was flat didn't make it so just meant that's what they believe so we have less harm more liberty and we have a greater reliance on science and also on public participation let me suggest these trends are not going to go away next month next year next time this course is taught next decade probably not these seem to be long-term trends can they be reconciled well maybe maybe but they will require that we rethink the role of science in the policy process and by science I don't just mean biology or chemistry or physics or engineering I mean social science policy analysis all fields of endeavor that engage in hypothesis testing the gathering of data the testing of and generating of theories and so forth systematic explanations for things it will require that we have a better understanding of science and it's also going to require that somehow science be put to public good and that the public understand the limitations of science that's going to require a high level of literacy on public policy issues on science issues so in dissecting this a little bit let me lay out some principles that policy analysts have for years now have been struggling if you think back to all of the various policy areas that we've talked about in the course and the tremendous optimism that accompanies the development of policies regarding education healthcare putting people on the moon insurance programs for retirees employment training programs and environmental protection all of these policy areas and more have been animated by a great faith in science if we could just do some good research really identify a problem clearly identify what causes it what its effects are and how to change it then we can hand it off hand off the ball to the politicians they'll know what to do because we've told them what to do and they'll adopt a policy that will improve our schools improve our nutrition improve our healthcare system clean up the environment less in risk and do all these magical things that we want I mean isn't that what science is good for good information hand it off to the policy makers they'll make policies and programs that will achieve all of these good things after all we can put a person on the moon we ought to be able to sort of solve the problem with public housing it's a scientific issue essentially right we just understand the social dynamics of poverty that's a science social science you remember Pruitt I know don't have to remind you of that well that's a myth all of this is a myth it's not just a myth that was discovered last year it's been a myth it is called the loading dock model of science and it is a model of science that for a long time has been assumed by much of the public in dealing with public policy problems globally scientists come up with answers they pass off those answers to the policy makers who then adopt them and then we come up with policies that should work like clockwork that's why we have universities for gosh sakes the reality we now know after all of this experience with public policies as we've seen the use of science by policy makers is much much more complicated science itself is a body of knowledge that is confronted with uncertainties scientists may disagree with one another experts in general may disagree with one another policy analysts who claim as Beryl Rayden who claim a systematic way of examining problems may disagree with one another they may suggest or prescribe or recommend radically divergent diagnoses and radically divergent solutions and all of those solutions may be faced by uncertainties and in fact that is one of the basic characteristics of science people so frustrated with global climate change talked about this a little bit we will certainly explore this issue next quarter it's not black and white well why can't you make up your mind why can't you tell us how warm it's going to get by gosh you want us to cut our energy use you want us to change our whole life style you want us to stop consuming everything but you can't even tell us how warm we're going to be in Palm Springs in 25 years from now what good are you you want us to take action but you can't give us answers obviously your science isn't very good now that's a radical view fortunately it's not a view shared by everybody but you get the picture the demands that are being made on environmental science social sciences planning to come up with systematic answers that will be absolute in science we consider uncertainty to be a sign of good science in the policy making community we consider uncertainty to mean you don't know there's a big difference so there's a policy analysis problem there's another problem this word translation we're translating scientists are not always particularly adept at translating their work into policy implications well we have found that global annual temperatures may increase between 2 and 5 degrees celsius over the next 100 years and we think that will influence biological systems in various ways and water supply in various ways and habitat in various ways and sea level so what's the bottom line what are the policy implications well gosh you know I'm not a lawyer I'm a scientist I don't write treaties that's what you guys public accepted I don't know what the public will accept that's your job you're an elected politician translating work into policy information question someone to work with do you think the flip side of this is that policy makers don't often understand science how many of you vote for that yeah sure so when we talk about translation this is quite a foreign language part of the problem is how good the conveyor of the information is and interpreting it the part of the problem is also how good you are as a listener and whether or not you ask the right questions and of course the public has a vague understanding of all sciences which is an increasing problem it wouldn't be such a problem if we weren't demanding so much more in terms of the reduction can you guarantee that there's absolutely no risk from this new food additive well our studies do not indicate any evidence of real harm I can answer my question is it safe that's not the way science always works so aren't these getting at that the public and policy makers and scientists just finding out how to face the music and admit that they're just not getting out of the game and you have to work together and people are just like crying about that because they have to stay and build a theater so how do you do that now this is like a tryout you've got science building social science planning all the fields that have systematic body of knowledge you've got science you've got policy makers and you've also then got public right now scientists don't worry much about the public except of course in funding your work think about that one depends on policy makers for answers and solutions policy makers don't understand science very well but they do understand votes so somewhere along the line you've got to change the way scientists view their role within the policy process you have to get policy makers to change the way they view the capacity of science to solve problems you also have to somehow get the public to be more astute about both the limitations and advantages of science and the limitations of the policy process and being able to solve all of these problems including their role in solving problems not all policy not all problems of environmental risk can be solved by passing a law some of them have to be addressed which is an interpersonal behavior which assume we'll come back to this point on Thursday which assume a phenomenon that we're beginning to call citizen science which means that one of the goals of future policy has to be not just to teach people about the policy solutions but to teach people to monitor their own interaction with their environment not just the natural environment but everything to be smarter consumers to be more cognizant of all of the things out there that can cause harm and what we have to do to be able to monitor environmental conditions to be able to monitor health conditions to be able to understand what's going on in our schools that's not going to be easy but it requires having a kind of scientific temperament to be in it doesn't help very much in the class that's kind of where we're going so what exactly does it mean in Sweden in terms of policy and they're very helpful aren't they in explaining how to but what are we going to see in lately in the end of the paper scientists usually attempts to say what kind of policy is your search on or is there something else to be involved that's a great question we're going to get to that maybe we'll get a little bit to that today but we'll definitely get to it on the last day of Thursday but to answer your question as directly as I can the problem is that you have these very disparate types of interchange in a scientific world in which communication between scientists is relatively easy right and academics is relatively easy and you have this policy making or political world which operates a very different set of dimensions and then you have the public which is divided into multiple pockets of interest let me suggest to you that what you're trying to do is not just translate which means interpret but you're also trying to span the boundaries that separate different ways of life that's a mouthful but that's really the challenge it's getting scientists to understand that they are embraced within a larger set of problems which requires them to understand that not everyone can understand the way they do work so you need scientists who can work with and communicate with policy makers you need policy makers who can work with scientists and most of all you need policy organizations in which these disparate ways of life we don't have a lot of that but there are some things like that one example of a policy that I think kind of does that is there's a stormwater pollution prevention that were done in San Diego that created an iphone app so that you can take pictures of polluted stormwater and it gets sent to the city who would then try and alleviate the problem translational expanded accessible to some people you have an iphone but at least in principle accessible participatory that is getting very close to what we're talking about that's kind of the future of policy it also implies organizations that are flat talk a little bit about that last week finally science doesn't always change things I mean we'd like to think it does but let's face it changes in society are partly determined by science and scientific predictions and they're partly determined by social choices which are anything but predictable let me leave you with a final slide to kind of tie some of these issues together at a very practical level for those of us living in California you all know AB 32 it's a CO2 emissions strategy for the state of California and it has a goal this legislation when the legislature in Sacramento established this act to reduce CO2 emissions and like Governor Schwarzenegger former Governor Schwarzenegger signed it into law was based on a number of can I dare say assumptions I just did okay it was based on a number of assumptions quite tractable assumptions that in fact we could reduce within the transportation sector the burning of fossil fuels that would contribute to not only pollutants but to greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in particular we could reduce to efficiency standards and municipal conservation programs electricity and natural gas use which would also lead to reductions in CO2 and methane which is methane and methane by the way is a greenhouse gas even if it's not persistent and then through forest conservation replanting urban forestry parks we could also achieve reductions in carbon dioxide and then we would have to do some other things to bring down CO2 emissions radical change transportation energy use and then you have a goal and I like this funnel at the end of this slide because it really underscores the challenges of the state trying to do more trying to achieve great risk reductions this is as you know a very pioneering effort California very few countries have tried to institute a policy like this much less states but in fact this does connote an increase in measures by the government a thickening of the role of the state in energy and environmental policies and not just energy and environmental policies but in economic development policies which are embedded in this correct but this is also going to be a jobs creation program and it's also an effort to achieve reductions in risk in global climate change and it's also California's way I should add of saying we're not going to wait for Washington to do something we're going to do something ourselves and if it works we can diffuse the innovation around the world and other states and regions and countries to adopt these policies but the funnel at the end is indicative of the quandary that we've been talking about for the last 40 minutes uncertainties if no actions are taken greenhouse gases will increase if some actions are taken in transportation which is the largest sector in which we can make gains according to the extrapolation will break down greenhouse gases if we do all these things that we think we can do will bring down reductions to a point where we're still going to miss the target by some nominal amount but in all cases let me leave you with a question what will determine how well we will approximate or meet or satisfy these various extrapolated targets is that a problem of science public support possibly population integration of all of the sectors of all of the sectors the public has to step up and think is better yet change the behavior science has to be able to translate so you're saying these are social choices we can tell you what needs to be done we cannot tell you that it will be done that's boundary span that's translation that's getting an understanding of how science contributes to the solution how policy makers have to use science to contribute to the solution and most of all what you and I as the public need to do from the time we get up before noon to address these issues in our personal behavior this is a classic problem regarding the future of public policy and we'll come back to this issue related concerns on course