Costa Rica—Pura vida
Costa Rica made policy decisions in the 1950s and 1960s when the constitution was revised to prioritise peace and social spending. Today the country is a leader on wellbeing and environmental policy.
Explore example
Identifying best practices and lessons learnt
How can you learn from your innovations and experimentations and where and with whom will you share this to create a bigger impact?
Purpose
To improve effectiveness of policy design processes by building on successes and learning from failuresTransforming the structure of your economy will take time and will require continuous experimentation, adaptation and learning to figure out what works and what doesn’t in your particular context. By utilising participatory policy design approaches you will foster and empower economic governance systems that can support you to better align policy with societal values and objectives over time.
Monitoring and evaluation are powerful tools that can help you to showcase quick wins, progress in wellbeing and learn from policy failures.
Acknowledging failures can be politically challenging but by supporting continuous public dialogue and discussion you can help people to appreciate trade-offs, unintended consequences and the complexity of achieving their wellbeing goals.
Through continuous evaluations and discussions you will gain valuable information that can help you to not only improve policy impact but also their method of design and implementation.
Resources
To find the resources from all of these chapters, please visit the tools and resources page
Qualitative mappings of impact
Policy learning
Focus groups
Participatory evaluations
Impact reflections
Policy evaluation
Examples
Tips
- Consider changes in overall wellbeing as well as impacts of wellbeing economic policies.
- Identify communities, areas, or individuals where policies have had powerful impacts on wellbeing, and discuss what can be learned and replicated elsewhere, depending on relevant context.
- Use quantitative / statistically driven counterfactual impact evaluation which establishes the causal link between policy and impact, along with qualitative evaluation research, to identify what has worked and provide a rounded view of attribution / causality (i.e., why it has worked).
- Be open to receiving criticism or negative feedback on policies in order to learn about why they did not work or how they could be reformed for increased impact.
- Discuss potential new wellbeing goals or gaps to be considered.
- Pay particular attention to unintended impacts and consider relationships between dimensions.
- Identify unexpected barriers to impact and discuss strategies for overcoming them.
- Consider lessons learnt in terms of the policy design process itself. What aspects worked well? Where can it be improved in the future?
- Conduct quantitative assessments from both ‘bottom-up’ (e.g., starting with changes in the action plan, then economy intervention areas, then wellbeing goals) and ‘top down’ (e.g., starting with wellbeing goals, etc.) to understand different causal links.
- Publish and share best practice with your community and the world.