Inside the Nudge Unit

I hope that one of the things we’ll see emerging in the next couple of years is a more effective cross-national clearing house or platform that enables policymakers and practitioners from across the world to be better able to access and build the evidence on What Works. There is no shortage of opinions and even research, but patching together evidence is not a democratic process in the sense that evidence varies greatly in its quality, and that based on better and more robust methods should be accorded much more weight. Central to this platform will be a set of toolkits like that of the EEF we saw above (see Figure 44), but with an important extra column that shows the range of countries and places where the intervention was found to be effective (or not). A policymaker –or public service provider –can be much more confident about importing an intervention that has been replicated in five or six countries than one that has only been shown to work in one place alone.