Made2Measure

The design of international development is ill-suited for our fast-paced world. It is not unusual for aid programs to take five or more years from blueprint to start-up and another five years for results to be reported, and even more time for the results to be “translated” into policy.   How Scientists Should Act Writing in the February 10, 2017 issue of Science , Erik Stockstad summarizes the message of Paul Cairney, a political scientist at the University of Stirling in the UK, author of the book, The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making . Cairney’s message is for those scientists who want their findings to find their way into policy: Data does not speak for itself.   Scientists should be “sifters, synthesizers, and analyzers” to make the evidence “speak.” Cairney repeats the common refrain of policy-makers: “I don’t have the time to consider all the information. How do I decide?” Policymaking is disorderly. Scientists need to dispense with the notion t...

In a January 23, 2017 post ( Right Use and Politics in Performance Measurement and Management ), I argued that practitioners of performance measurement and management (PMM) must not ignore the reality of politics if they want to ensure the “right use” of PMM. They do so at peril of coming into the cross-hairs of foes who would “shoot the messenger” rather than consider data that they don’t like. The lesson that performance measurement data is not above politics came into full international view today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal article today written by Marcus Walker under the title Greeks Make Data The Enemy: Facing resurgent debt crisis, politicians indulge in conspiracy theories involving former   statistics chief . Andreas Georgiou, an American-trained economist and Greek citizen who moved from the U.S. and became Greece’s first independent head of statistics in 2010, stands accused by his foes of manipulating the country’s deficit figures in a plot t...