I orea te tuatara: Untangling Evidence and Judgement

01/10/2017

I am interested in the persistent tension between professional judgement and managerial practice: a tension that matters greatly for public policy. Managerialism places significant weight on evidential approaches to policymaking. Yet, I have four concerns about how these approaches are often applied.

First, I am concerned about the confidence officials place in their information systems. Governments have repeatedly been told they have been poor stewards of their core data sets. Yet evidential methodologies depend on the availability and quality of this very data.

Second, too few recognise that evidence and professional judgement are inseparable, and neither, alone, constitutes a policy choice. Judgement without evidence is reckless; evidence without judgement is useless. It follows that evidential approaches should be guided primarily by the public professions: doctors, nurses, care and protection professionals, social workers, refugee and refuge workers, probation officers, teachers, firefighters, soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen, police, engineers, transport planners, and scientists, rather than by the managerial and policy class of the core public service.

Third, policy practitioners often forget that the lives of individuals and families are shaped by, though never fully determined by, wider social, historical, and institutional contexts. Yet governments consistently underinvest in understanding the historical, institutional, and cultural forces that create inequality, marginalisation, and discrimination. There are exceptions, such as the Dunedin Study, but these only highlight the general neglect.

Finally, I am concerned that evidential methodologies often obscure a fundamental philosophical distinction between is and ought. Simply because something is the case does not mean it ought to be. Neither evidence nor professional judgement alone can tell a Minister what they ought to do. To pretend otherwise is to make a leap from description to prescription, violating Hume’s Law and forgetting that policy arises from a political system, where decisions are made, and political context is everything.

I orea te tuatara ka puta ki waho.