The other day I looked at a smart technique the Commission used to prepare legislation.
The technique allows the Commission to prepare and adopt good quality and effective public policy and legislation.
For a long time in air pollution, the Commission crowdsourced solutions from across the commission, governments, experts from industry and NGOs, and international organisations. They found out that by bringing experts together, tricky and complex issues were deliberated on by people who knew what they were talking about and had real solutions. Sitting around a table, they took deep dives in the sources, health effects, solutions, trade-offs and the costs and benefits for action.
It is so effective that when used, it leads to ambitous, global leading standards being adopted by the EU and implemented. Those standards tend to get co-opted globally.
It even speeds up the adoption of legislation. All the tough questions are answered in the advance. And, it is useful to know the answers to problems before you invest tens of billions of euros to solve difficult public policy questions.
This approach is really useful to help solve problems before they happen. Dan Heath in ‘Upstream’ shows that ‘with some forethought, we can prevent problems before they happen, and even when we can’t stop them entirely, we can often blunt their impact’ (Upstream, p.231).
Second-Order Effects
If you are designing new laws, one of the basic things you should do, is to anticipate second-order effects beyond your immediate work. If you don’t, you are going to mess things up.
Heath takes to task plastic bag bans in Chicago in 2014. Attempts there to rid the environment of plastic led to more plastic! He calls it the cobra effect.
He notes “Think of all the ingredients required even to analyse a policy like the plastic bag ban: the computer systems, the data collection, the network infrastructure, not to mention the ecosystem of smart people who know how to structure experiments that can shed light on the city and statewide policies’ (Upstream, p.187).
It’s not easy to do smart policymaking. It has the benefit of avoiding costly and ineffective policies.
Downsides
There are some downsides to this approach.
It is against the popular belief that a small group of officials, let alone an inter-service steering group, have all the answers to prepare the solutions for a challenging piece of public policy.
The idea that the ‘problem of knowledge’ has been solved because you passed through the entrance of the College of Europe, or passed the Commission’s Concours, is a strong force in the Commission.
Of course, this could make some sense if the Commission trained staff working on policy and legislation on policymaking. But, given the blank stares I get when I mention the name ‘Cass Sunstein’ in Brussels, that course is not yet to be offered.
This approach puts constraints bright young things in the Instiutions who have the solutions for every issue, yet have no real-life expertise or evidence to ‘validate’ their wisdom.
Upsides
The upsides are great.
Smart policymaking draws on real expertise. The spirit is reflected in the all but the sidelined ‘Better Regulation’ Guidelines.
Smart policymaking, like CAFE, leads to good solutions, that work, and are implemented and enforced. It also gets buy-in from those being regulated. It tends to narrow down the areas in dispute and get the Council and EP to focus on a few things.
Maybe such ideas will become fashionable again in a more technocratic, less political, and more effective Commission.