The Politics of Monitoring: Information, Indicators and Targets in Climate Change, Defence and Immigration Policy

Monitoring is central to the policy process. Policymakers need to gather information in order to identify problems, and appraise whether their policies are working: How widespread is illegal immigration? Is defence spending efficient? Are CO2 emissions being reduced? Yet despite its pivotal role, monitoring has been neglected by scholars. Research has tended to focus on how policies get made, rather than how policy problems are tracked or how the impacts of policies are appraised. This is surprising, given the radical changes to government monitoring practices over the past three decades. Since 1981, successive Conservative and Labour administrations have expanded the use of performance indicators and targets as a method of monitoring policy. More recently, the 2010 coalition government vowed to reverse the 'target culture', criticising the distortions that arise from an emphasis on targets and delivery. These shifts in monitoring practices raise a number of key questions. What explains the appeal of targets and indicators, and in what ways have they been implemented across policy sectors? How has the 'target culture' affected policy outcomes and political debate? And once in place, how feasible is it to roll back such performance-based monitoring practices?

Our study will provide the first ever attempt to systematically track, compare and explain UK government monitoring practices, focusing on three sectors - climate change, immigration control and defence procurement. These areas have been selected both because they have seen considerable change in monitoring practices; and because they allow us to test different theories about the factors shaping monitoring systems. (The Case for Support offers more detail on the case selection strategy.)

Immigration policy has seen a series of attempts to measure immigration levels and their economic and social impacts. But such monitoring practices have been fraught with controversy and repeatedly adjusted in the face of political and media criticism, as well as internal Home Office restructuring. We would expect these factors to produce simplified monitoring practices designed to demonstrate government impact. The pressure to allay public concerns may also incentivise forms of 'gaming' among policymakers. By contrast, the monitoring of CO2 emissions has largely been left to experts and scientific civil servants. Unlike immigration, the meeting of targets is not the object of extensive media attention, but is closely scrutinised by the expert policy community as well as international and EU actors. Yet the focus on CO2 may crowd out observation of other aspects of climate change, potentially distorting policy prioritisation and resource allocation. Moreover, we expect that international norms may lead to other forms of 'gaming' designed to bypass externally imposed targets. Our third area, defence procurement, raises a rather different set of challenges. Despite continued problems (delays, escalating costs, poor operational performance) there has been a surprising lack of monitoring of either processes or outputs. We expect that issues of secrecy, industrial interests, as well as the unpredictability of conflict, have left the MoD relatively screened from pressure to introduce rigorous monitoring practices - though recent controversy over mismanagement and excessive costs may be challenging this lack of scrutiny.

The comparative analysis of these sectors will enable us to better understand the factors shaping monitoring practices in general. It will also shed light on how different types of monitoring, including targets, may produce distortions in policy and political debate. It will thereby fill an important gap in our understanding of policymaking. The findings should also feed into political and practitioner debates about effective monitoring, especially ongoing discussions about the desirability of different types of targets in public policy.

Who will benefit?

We expect the principal beneficiaries of the project to be politicians, civil servants, policy advisors, and other members of the policy community concerned about effective policy monitoring (think tanks, NGOs, researchers and private sector personnel with a stake in policy). While the research focuses on the cases of climate change, immigration control and defence procurement in the UK, its findings should have more general relevance across policy sectors, as well as for those in other national and devolved administrations.

In addition, our analysis of the processes involved in monitoring policy problems and in setting targets, and the possible distortions arising from such practices, may benefit other types of organisation outside of government. We will be alert to findings that might produce useful parallels with monitoring in, e.g., international organisations, NGOs or large firms.

How will they benefit?

Monitoring of perfomance has become a central activity of the UK government in recent decades, and despite the coalition government's criticism of the 'target culture', this trend seems unlikely to be reversed. There remain strong pressures to track problems and legitimise policies through measuring key indicators such as carbon emissions, immigration numbers, or defence procurement costs. Moreover, such pressures are likely to increase across all sectors of policy, as governments are expected to measure and justify their performance in an age of economic austerity. Despite the importance of monitoring, however, the debate on performance and targets is characterised by often simplistic and politicised rhetoric, and lacks rigorous underpinning research. Political and media discussion often implies that the choice is between having multiple targets, or no targets at all. More informed policy specialists are keen to discuss the merits of different types of targets, e.g. more ambitious stretch targets v. easily met targets; or process v. output targets. But there is little methodical or theoretically guided evidence to support these debates. We hope that our research can help meet this need.

More specifically, we expect policymakers and stakeholders to benefit in two main ways.

1. First, the research will provide detailed accounts of how monitoring practices have developed over the last 20 years in the areas of climate change, immigration control and defence procurement. The case studies will provide the first detailed analysis of how monitoring has developed in these areas, and how the monitoring processes that were implemented affected performance and led to changes in organisational practices. The research will lead to greater understanding of how monitoring was implemented, what kinds of targets were set, to what degree these targets were met, whether performance in general was seen to have improved, and whether there were unintended consequences (e.g. from working to target).

2. Second, these detailed case studies will be analysed comparatively to provide more generalisable understanding of the ways in which the use of monitoring can be made more effective. A taxonomy of the different types of monitoring will be developed, and we will seek to identify and understand any correlations between different monitoring approaches and efficacy. All those involved in governance activities involving monitoring - across policy sectors, and within the UK and beyond - could potentially benefit from this research.

We will achieve these impacts through a series of seminars organised with the Institute for Public Policy Research; policy briefings circulated to a wide database of user contacts; presentations at talks and conferences; and our website and blogposts. We also aim to bring our findings to a wider international policy audience through providing other academics with the analytical and theoretical tools to carry out similar research in cognate policy areas and for other national cases.