Understanding Public Good

Frameworks Introduction This chapter includes working definitions, practical tools, models, templates, and a holistic step-by-step guide to an adaptive “policy journey” approach to help you track and proactively design, deliver and manage policies end to end. We also have included guidance on:

• evidence
• continual evaluation
• dynamic risk management
• policymaking during crises
• how to work effectively (and appropriately) with Ministers and their offices
• how to establish effective, sustainable policy partnerships. We encourage you to also read the Fitness chapter, so you can explore the mindsets and ways of working that best sets you (and your policy) up for success. Understanding Public Good Throughout this playbook, we often use the term “public good”. It is important to clarify what we mean by the term so that everyone is speaking the same language. Public good has a very specific definition to economists. In economics, a public good is a product or service featuring non-excludability and non-rivalrous properties. This means that people can’t be stopped from consuming or using the good and that one person’s use does not diminish its availability to others’ usage of the good or service. Some traditional examples used to illustrate this economic version of a public good are national defense, clean air and public parks. A challenge to public goods from an economics perspective is the presence of the free rider problem and market failure. People benefit from the good or service but have no incentive to pay for it because they could logically enjoy the benefits, as a free-rider, and let someone else pay. This creates an inability for private sector providers to produce or charge for the good. As a result, these goods and services represent market failure in that they don’t lead to efficient resource allocation and will be under-provided or not provided at all without external intervention. Together, this means public goods usually have to either be provided directly by the state itself or heavily subsidised. In addition to economic definitions, there are also a plethora of philosophical positions attached to the notion of public good. Sometimes public goods are contrasted with private goods by determining whether a particular activity or product is located in the public sector or in the private sector. This sectoral distinction brings into focus the particular actions or resources that take place in the so-called public square as opposed to those located more appropriately in the private arena, whether that’s in private sector settings or in civil society. This leads to the discussions that take place about public good as a form of public interest test. That is, what constitutes the general welfare of a community as a whole, as opposed to individual or smaller private group interests? There are a whole range of philosophical frameworks that attempt to ponder and map this dimension of what constitutes a public good. We are not going to go into the range of ethical theories, but we recognise the diversity of thoughts and ideas that apply to thinking and action about collective societal benefits and outcomes. This is all helpful information to know when talking about public goods from economic and philosophical perspectives, but it is not what we mean when we refer to the term throughout this playbook. Instead, we are referring to a more expansive and dynamic view of public good. When we use the term in the playbook we are proposing that there is no single definition of public good. We see it as tethered to context in each and every instance of policymaking. As such, there is no shortcut or cookie-cutter recipe to determine it.