Co-design,evaluation and the Northern Ireland Innovation Lab

Around the world there are more than 100 policy labs—multi-disciplinary government teams developing public services and policies using innovation methods to engage citizens and stakeholders. These policy labs use a range of innovation methods and approaches, including co-production, co-creation, co-design, behavioural insights, systems thinking, ethnography, data science, nudge theory and lean processes. Although the methods may vary, one element is consistent: policy labs actively, creatively and collaboratively engage the public and a wide range of stakeholders in jointly developing solutions. The Northern Ireland Public Sector Innovation Lab (iLab) is part of a growing UK and international community of policy labs using co-design to engage with users for value co-creation, aiming to improve public governance by creating a safe space to generate ideas, test prototypes and refine concepts with beneficiaries. Drawing on iLab’s experience, this paper explores three questions: What are the main determinants of effective co-design? What are the unintended consequences of co-design? And what lessons can be learned from iLab and shared with other policy labs?     

What role for social scientists in risk expertise?

When it comes to risks – health and environmental risks, like those linked to the use of nanotechnologies, pesticides, etc. – three main groups of actors are easily identified, brought together through boundary organisations such as environmental and sanitary risk agencies: the natural and technical scientists, who provide their expertise to assess risks (especially toxicologists, epidemiologists and microbiologists); the policy makers, who take decisions regarding risk management and risk regulation; the lay public, who are more and more involved in participatory frameworks. Sometimes three other groups of actors are added: the ‘economists’ who can for instance conduct cost–benefit assessments or multi-criteria analyses (especially ecological economists, public economists, political economists and social economists); the ‘philosophers’/‘ethicists’ who can use ethics to highlight moral choices and responsibilities in face of risks; and the ‘jurists’/‘legal experts’ who can justify authorisation or interdiction according to law. Inversely, there is a group of actors which is not clearly identified, that of social scientists, even though a considerable quantity of social science knowledge on risk has been produced. Why is there such a discrepancy? This article, based on a critical review of the literature, aims to make sense of the fuzziness surrounding the involvement of social scientists when it comes to risk expertise. The article shows that one reason for this puzzling situation is to be found in the gap between what social scientists often want to do when they are called in as risk experts and what natural scientists and public policy makers actually expect from them.     

Health—The Agenda for an Incoming Government

An incoming government has two major questions to address in respect of National Health Service policy, each of which offers two broad approaches. The first is how to ration health care; the broad choice lies between implicit and explicit approaches. The second is what philosophy of governance to adopt; here the further choice lies between further pluralization and reintegration.     

A life history approach to perceptions of global climate change risk: young adults’ experiences about impacts,causes, and solutions

Although the general acceptance of human-influenced global climate change within the technical sphere of science is important to consider, public perceptions of global climate change risks, impacts, causes, and solutions are as important to policy actions as scientific findings. Yet, studies analyzing climate change risk perceptions suffer from a number of limitations or use only a handful of approaches. Using a limited life history approach, this article answers calls for additional qualitative approaches in risk perception research. This article (1) introduces risk perception researchers to the limited life history method; (2) discovers that young adults articulate climate change solutions at the individual level, often as consumers, and blend their responses to climate change risks and advocacy for solutions with a general, environmentally friendly orientation, a ‘green posture;’ and (3) contends the key sources informing young adults’ perceptions about climate change risk have changed significantly from previous studies.     

Towards Analytic‐deliberative Forms of Risk Governance in the UK? Reflecting on Learning in Radioactive Waste

While participatory forms of risk assessment and management have been the focus of much conceptualisation, experimentation, and evaluation, relatively less effort has gone into understanding how so called ‘analytic‐deliberative’ processes are developing across policy‐for‐real decision contexts. This paper develops a novel typology of citizen‐science interaction as a basis for analysing the nature and extent of recent participatory risk assessment practice in the UK. It draws on the reflections of professional actors operating across the UK environmental risk domain, focusing down on practice in the area of radioactive waste between 1998 and 2003. Compared with past science‐centred approaches, analysis shows an ‘opening up’ of risk decision processes to extended actors, knowledges, and values, with particular importance placed on public involvement in front‐end framing. This is being constrained by a failure to integrate engagement throughout decision processes, the exclusion of publics from assessing/evaluating environmental risks, and the upholding of a strict separation between citizens/science. These patterns of analytic‐deliberative practice — determined by contextual influences, barriers and challenges operating across UK environmental risk issue‐areas — highlight the need for further methodological development and systematic evaluation of relations between processes and outcomes.     

The allocation of catastrophe risk

The potential losses from catastrophes have led financial researchers to address the following questions: (1) to what extent is catastrophe risk being shared (insured) and is the allocation of catastrophe risk consistent with notions of optimal risk sharing? (2) if not, what market imperfections hinder the efficient allocation of catastrophe risk? and (3) are there government policies or private market solutions that could lead to a more efficient allocation of catastrophe risk? This paper summarizes the research that has been conducted on these questions.     

Post-normal institutional identities: Quality assurance,reflexivity and ethos of care

This paper suggests adopting a ‘post-normal science’ (PNS) style and practice in scientific advice, and motivate the urgency of this methodological stance with the increasing complexity, and polarisation affecting the use of science-based evidence for policy. We reflect on challenges and opportunities faced by a ‘boundary organisation’ that interfaces between science and policy, taking as example the European Commission’s Directorate General Joint Research Centre, whose mission is stated as that to be the “in-house science service”. We suggest that such an institution can be exemplary as to what could be changed to improve the quality of evidence feeding into the policy processes in the European Union. This paper suggests how an in-house culture of reflexivity and humility could trigger changes in the existing styles and methods of scientific governance; at the JRC, taken as example, this would mean opening up to the existing plurality of norms and styles of scientific inquiry, and adopting more participatory approaches of knowledge production, assessment and governance. We submit that the institutional changes advocated here are desirable and urgent in order to confront the ongoing erosion of trust in ‘evidence based policy’, anticipating controversies before they become evident in the institutional setting in which institutions operate.     

The science of ‘what-if?’

An appropriate response to the new challenges to science will require more than new explicit goals and social organisation. New leading questions will be appropriate. The traditional questions of ‘what/how?’ for research and ‘how/why?’ for the design fields, will be supplemented by ‘what-if?’. This previously had its place in exploratory phases of all research; now it will become an essential component of ‘post-normal’ science. Its form precludes the dogmatic and exclusive styles which have hitherto been dominant in science as applied to policy problems; and it lends itself to open enquiry and public participation.     

Financial and external reporting research: the broadening corporate governance challenge

This study provides a critical examination of contemporary financial and external reporting research from a corporate governance perspective. Adopting Hines' social constructionist approach to financial reporting, the study investigates research into accounting publishing patterns, published reviews of major subject areas within financial and external reporting research, and interviews a sample of accounting professors in British universities. The findings reveal a strong North American economics and finance-based positivist influence, a largely uncritical acceptance of accounting's subservience to the demands of the market, a reluctance to engage major policy questions and broader reporting constituencies. These appear to be conditioned to a large degree by internal features and pressures within the academic research community. Evidence is presented for greater attention to major environmental shifts impacting accounting and communities globally, a reinvigoration of researchers' direct engagement with reporting constituents in the field, a revisiting of major accounting, business, social and environmental policy questions, and a preparedness to address today's major corporate governance concerns of communities and governments.     

Commentary on Parker: Groundhog Day and optimism

This paper seeks to provide a supportive commentary to the paper by Lee Parker that assesses the deliverables and relevance of qualitative accounting research. This commentary on Parker's work focuses more narrowly than Parker and concentrates on the differences between qualitative research and approaches adopting a positivistic or normative perspective and less on the exemplars in the management accounting literature. The commentary will seek to explore these differences by reverting to a broader social science literature. The commentary will argue for recognising the complementarity of different research approaches – recognising difference and but recognising the strengths of both; bringing their understandings together when it helps to do so, but not seeking to combine them and ignore their difference roots; not seeking to privilege any approach over any other apart from recognising that different questions need different approaches to answer them. At the latter end of this commentary I offer some solutions that might be considered in relation to the building of a body of knowledge, using the ideas of middle range thinking. Finally I develop some suggestions to meet for Parker's call for us to make efforts to communicate more broadly and argue for the academic accounting community to consider interdisciplinary engagement with the arts.     

Informal household preparedness: methodological approaches to everyday practices

Abstract

Despite increasing attention to individuals’ everyday lives in the literature on risk, few studies investigate household preparedness within the everyday life context. Preparedness is most often regarded as a predefined set of capacities for dealing with emergencies. This article presents methodological approaches for studying what I suggest calling informal preparedness activities that are performed as part of daily life in households. Starting with the assumption that everyday life is enacted through culturally and socially shared practices, it is argued that preparedness is interwoven into these practices. Contrary to studying preparedness as the degree to which households are aware of and act according to a formal definition of preparedness, informal household preparedness focuses on preparedness as embedded in the routinised practices that make up everyday life. The study of informal household preparedness is based on three methodological approaches that explore these practices: (i) Performance of everyday practices, where interviews that focus on performance ask questions about what practitioners actually do; (ii) materiality, where walk-alongs are used to connect performance interviews to the material surroundings; and (iii) visualisation, where the material aspects of informal preparedness are documented. These approaches were carried out in a study of Norwegian households’ management of and preparedness for electricity and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure breakdowns. Addressing informal and formal preparedness activities expands our understanding of household preparedness and should help policy makers recognise the active role of households and their actual resources and constraints in future preparedness planning.     

Citizen views about public meetings

The current study seeks to demonstrate that a citizen views about public meeting structure and related groups matter in predicting satisfaction with public engagement and willingness to attend future meetings. Public health agencies frequently use public meetings to communicate risk information, but relatively little social science research has examined how potential meeting participants view them. Using survey data (N?=?866) collected in seven US communities where health agencies were investigating possible local cancer clusters and holding public meetings to communicate with local residents, the current study replicates and extends an earlier inquiry related to citizens satisfaction with public meetings used for risk communication. Whereas previous research found that expectations, health agency credibility, and risk perceptions predicted satisfaction with public meetings, the current results did not show a significant relationship between agency credibility, risk perceptions, and satisfaction. Further, the results suggest it may make sense to consider ‘views about public meetings’ as a single measure that includes citizens’ structural expectations for meetings. Finally, the current study finds that views about public officials and views about meetings relate to individuals’ willingness to attend future meetings. Additional variable development and modeling research is suggested.     

Collateral composition,diversification risk,and systemically important merchant banks

The impact of collateral diversification by non-financial firms on systemic risk is studied in a general equilibrium model with standard production functions and mixed debt-equity financing. Systemic risk comes about as soon as firms diversify their collateral by holding claims on a big wholesale (merchant) bank whose asset side includes claims on the same producer set. The merchant bank sector proves to be fragile (has a short distance to default) regardless of competition. In this setting, the policy response, consisting in official guarantees for the merchant bank's liabilities, entails considerable government loss risk. An alternative without the need for public sector involvement is to encourage systemically important merchant banks to introduce a simple bail-in mechanism by restricting their liabilities to contingent convertible bonds. This line of regulatory policy is particularly relevant to the containment of systemic events in globally leveraged economies serviced by big international banks outside host country regulatory control.     

Risky business—reconceptualizing risk and innovation in public services

This paper explores the relationship between risk and innovation in public services, presenting the state of the literature across different disciplines and the academic and policy literature. It suggests a novel framework to approach risk, emphasising the importance of differentiating between different types of risk and risk management. The paper offers a typology of risk types and management approaches that indicates different effects on the type of public service innovation. It concludes by considering the implications for theory and practice.     

Does sentiment affect stock returns? A meta-analysis across survey-based measures

We are the first to meta-analyze the literature on the relationship between sentiment and stock returns, a topic that reacts to the history of systemic events causing asset bubbles in financial markets. We focus on three questions — whether the literature is biased; what is the “true effect” beyond this bias; and what are the key determinants of the variance among the estimates in the literature. To answer those questions we collect 1311 point estimates from 30 primary studies and use state-of-art meta-analytical approaches. Both linear and non-linear tests for publication bias suggest that the “true effect” of an improvement in sentiment is non-negligible and negative. In the majority of specifications, researchers tend to report this effect as being much stronger than it actually is. Next, using Bayesian model averaging we show that the effect of sentiment on future returns is significantly stronger for individual investors than for large institutions, and in US stock markets compared with European ones. The effect also depends on several data and model characteristics.     

How do passive funds act as active owners? Evidence from mutual fund voting records

The rise of passive institutional investors in the U.S. stock market raises questions about the governance implications to their portfolio firms. While the existing literature documents positive governance changes when passive institutional ownership displaces retail ownership, it remains unclear how passive institutional ownership approaches corporate governance differently than their active peers. This paper compares the proxy voting behaviors between same-family passive and active mutual funds with identical investment styles. We find that passive funds are not more likely to vote in favor of governance reforms than active funds. We also provide suggestive evidence that besides voting, the influence of passive funds on corporate governance also operates through a “behind the scenes” channel.     

What Questions Do Board Members in Public Service Organizations Ask about Executive Compensation?

The purpose of this study is to investigate the governance questions that board members in public service organizations ask as they go about fulfilling their responsibilities for the oversight of executive compensation. We investigate the usage and perceived importance by board members of the 24 questions proposed by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants that directors should ask about executive compensation. The study is based on a usable sample of 47 board members from public service organizations who attended a Canadian director training program. Our results suggest that the recommended executive compensation governance questions are not being asked with the same frequency or considered equally important by board members of public service organizations. Furthermore, the correlation between a question’s usage frequency and its perceived importance was not perfect. However, there appears to be a significantly positive relationship among the number of executive compensation governance questions asked and selected elements of a board’s governance structure.     

Public Policy and Accounting Research: What Is to Be Done?

Abstract

Singleton-Green [2010. The communication gap: Why doesn't accounting research make a greater contribution to debates on accounting policy? Accounting in Europe, 7(2), 129–145] argues that a communication gap between researchers and those involved in public debates on accounting problems significantly reduces the impact of accounting research. A new ICAEW report, The Effects of Mandatory IFRS Adoption in the EU: a Review of Empirical Research, tries to bridge the communication gap on the subject that it covers. The report found not only a significant amount of relevant research, but also that its usefulness was limited in various ways. The paper makes a number of recommendations to researchers: they should point out any biases in the data they use, address some issues through field work, not assume that surrounding institutions are unchanged, be careful to understand the specific features of the countries they cover, investigate differences in previous research, and state the economic significance of their findings. The paper also makes recommendations for non-academic participants in public policy debates, including: they should actively promote relevant research, help researchers get access to information, and help ensure that researchers have the incentives to do what is needed to benefit public policy.     

Towards democratic governance of uncertainty? Contesting notions of participation,control and accountability

Managing risk in international society has posed a new challenge not only to states and international organisations, but also to experts, scientists and citizens. It has generated a demand for new sets of laws, regulations, instruments and governing bodies to tackle various risks such as natural disasters, economic and financial crises, and unintended consequences of policy reforms. Accordingly, new modes of interactions between states, experts and citizens seem to be emerging across countries and in different high-risk sectors. Little research has been done to illuminate interactive and dynamic aspects of emerging governance and regulatory arrangements and their impact on participation, control and accountability in liberal democracies. This special issue has assembled research papers and commentaries from practitioners and academics which critically examine these themes and explore what future research on the ‘world risk society’ could offer to political science and beyond.