HOW CONTEXT MATTERS
Wednesday, 28 July 2004
19
Needless to say, there is no explicit consideration of the policy process in current
discussion, and no approach along Bayesian lines has been presented so far.
The final dimension of context is legitimacy. As mentioned above, there are different
criteria used by different actors to evaluate success. This is acknowledged by the
Communication of the Commission on impact assessment (2002), where it is argued
that the main goal of RIA is to describe and measure the great trade-offs behind a
regulatory choice. Accurate analysis is obviously a cornerstone for the credibility of
RIA, but it should present the decision-makers with some important issues they have
to address – rather than pretending that impact analysis ‘silences’ the debate by
providing a ‘scientific’ solution to political problems.
If questions are at least as important as answers, then legitimacy is the best criterion to
evaluate quality and success. Cross-national experience (early UK experience of
compliance cost assessment, France and Germany in the 1990s) shows that when RIA
is built around only one support constituency (such as the business community) the
problems of legitimacy become insurmountable. The Italian case (La Spina 2002) is
another example of legitimacy problems. RIA was introduced in this country under
pressure from the OECD by a small group of policy advisors and a motivated
Minister. But neither the business community, nor the civil society and the academics
were really interested in this new tool. The result was the momentum for RIA was
lost.
New policy instruments necessitate a robust network of stakeholders. The latter does
not necessarily produce legitimacy, but it is a necessary condition. Different actors
may have different views on the quality of RIA performed by institutions, but the
sheer fact that they raise issues, make points, push for higher standards is a
fundamental catalyst of policy improvement. By contrast, tools that interest only
policy officers tend to float in a sort of limbo and eventually become useless. In this
connection, one should look favourably at the development of networks of academics
and private sector think-tanks that challenge the government’s numbers. By doing so,
they perform a sort of extended peer review and quality control of what institutions
do.
Convention