Behavioral Insights for Policy Design: A New Framework for Understanding Wicked Social Problems and Designing Policies for Real Citizens

This textbook is an introductory guide to applying behavioral sciences and systemic thinking into public policy design and implementation. It presents an innovative public management toolkit to handle ‘wicked’ social problems – those not very responsive to traditional public policy instruments – by incorporating insights from the behavioral sciences and systemic design in the diagnostics of public problems, based on the motivations and constraints of the ‘real citizen’ – beyond the ideal citizen’s perfectly rational intentions and plans devoid of social context or self-control problems.

This volume aims to motivate the inclusion of broader and deeper insights from the behavioral sciences – especially behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and social psychology – to the repertoire of public managers by introducing new methodologies for diagnosing the root causes behind public problems and for designing effective policies to address them. The new diagnosis tool – the MSI framework (an acronym for Motivation, Self-control, and Inattention problems) –, will help identify new mechanisms underlying social problems or reinterpret known problems based on behavioral insights. The new methodology for policy design – the PRIx framework (an acronym for Pricing policies, Regulatory policies, and Information policies) –, will enrich existing policy tools with such behavioral insights.

Behavioral Insights for Policy Design: A New Framework for Understanding Wicked Social Problems and Designing Policies for Real Citizens will be a useful and practical guide to public managers and students of graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in public management interested in learning how to apply innovative tools and methodologies inspired by the behavioral sciences into public policy design in a simple and practical way, even when dealing with complex social problems.

Guilherme Lichand is Assistant Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, USA. His research is primarily about the sources of education inequities in low- and middle-income countries, and the interventions with potential to overturn them. He holds a PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University, USA. He has been acknowledged by the Schwab Foundation and Folha de São Paulo as Brazil's top-10 social entrepreneur of the year (post-COVID legacy), in 2020, and by MIT Technology Review as Brazil's top social innovator among under-35 entrepreneurs, in 2014. He is also a co-founder at Movva, a student success platform that uses behavioral insights to engage students and school communities to improve learning outcomes among low-income students across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Amiris de Paula Serdeira currently coordinates the Alliance for Literacy at the Natura Institute, Brazil. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics and a specialization in public management. She has worked with public policies with high social impact for over 8 years, with experience in strategic and project management, monitoring and evaluation, and policy design. Her research and experiences involve themes related to primary and secondary education, social innovation, and socioeconomic development in themes such as socioemotional development, literacy, impact evaluation, and designing innovative educational policies in public schools. Her work is focused on educational policy, especially in social impact project management and impact evaluation, having worked across several of the main education NGOs and private initiatives dedicated to improving public education in Brazil, including Ayrton Senna Institute, Insper, Oppen Social, and the Natura Institute.

Bruno Martins Rizardi is a designer and holds an MBA in project management.  He has worked with the design and implementation of public policies at the municipal, state, and national levels in Brazil. He has developed design-based methodologies to improve the way public programs are formulated and implemented. In particular, he has supported the structuring of programs across the Ministries of Education, Citizenship, Human Rights, and Economy.  He is a co-founder at Catálise Social, a consultancy company that uses collaborative approaches to create participatory public policies. He is the author of four other books on design and public policies. He is currently a Director at the Federal Ministry of Management and Public Service Innovation, Brazil.