This article is written by Ammaarah Martinus, Director, Policy, Research and Analysis and Cameron Cyster, Policy and Strategy researcher for the Western Cape Government, South Africa.

Behavioural insights (BI) has gone from a fringe idea to a major trend in the public sector in the last five years.

A 2018 OECD report shows that over 200 governments across the globe are applying behavioural insights in varied ways.

Take-up does not always mean mainstreaming, though, which happens when behaviourally informed policies or interventions have either been scaled up, or integrated into “business-as-usual”. Our experience at the Western Cape Government in South Africa (WCG) tells a similar story.

At the Premier’s Department, we have trialled a range of behavioural insights since 2012. This work has spanned across public safety, sustainability, education, and health and wellness. But out of the eight pilots, only two have been successfully mainstreamed.

These pilots were mainstreamed not just because their impacts were great – the impacts of the other pilots were, too. What made the difference was the approaches we used, which can be replicated by public servants everywhere.

Responding to a crisis, quickly

In the words of J. F. Kennedy, “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger — but recognise the opportunity.”

It was with this thinking in mind that we initiated our water savings project. In 2018 Cape Town almost became the first major city to run completely out of water.

To address the issue, regulations required significant behaviour-change from citizens; such as limiting individuals to only using 50 litres of water per day. But reducing household consumption was not enough to avoid Day Zero when the taps would run dry. Public facilities, such as schools, also used a lot of water.

Growth Mindset is a vital cog in the Education Department’s T2P strategy, which aims to target one million children in the next five years

To curb consumption in schools, we partnered with the Department of Education, a mass retailer and two universities to rapidly design and implement a water saving project. It combined smart water meter technology with basic infrastructure upgrades and a suite of behavioural interventions to reduce water consumption at low resourced schools.

To change behaviours, one group of schools were given water consumption information on a weekly basis. Whereas another group of schools received the same weekly information and were entered into an inter-school competition, where updated leader-boards ranked each school’s water savings relative to each other.

After a 6-month pilot, the water savings were huge. Water use was reduced by up to 26%, and some schools were convinced to continue using the system after the end of the intervention period.

In this case, “speed to market” counted in our favour. This is not always the case with BI interventions, though. Typically, you have prolonged diagnostic and prototyping stages, which may serve you well if you have time for methodological rigour. But, if you’re approaching catastrophe, you don’t have this luxury.

The lessons we have learnt from this is that you can and should collaborate with academic partners for rapid research and design, work with the private sector to unlock funding and crucially, break down government silos to co-implement and multiply your impact.

Landing your project in an already existing programme

Granted, working to prevent a looming disaster makes it easier to get buy-in for solutions that are outside the box. But what can you do when the crisis is more of a slow burn?

This was the case in our second successfully mainstreamed BI intervention, the Growth Mindset pilot, which aimed to improve students’ attitudes toward their school work.

In our case, the relationship we had with the Education Department helped.

The intervention, which started in 2017, aimed at improving children’s academic performance by changing their attitudes towards learning. To do this, children watched a series of cartoons covering the Growth Mindset journey of Mojo the monster, which were supplemented by interactive activities. We incorporated these activities into an already existing academic support programme, where children received the behavioural treatments in addition to their normal programme schedule.

As our BI footprint matured, the need for mainstreaming strategies became more and more clear

In parallel to our intervention, the Education Department designed a strategy for their new term of office. Known as Transform to Perform (T2P), the strategy aimed to shift the mindsets of everyone in the education system — education officials, school management, teachers and students.

Thankfully, the pilot produced positive results. If students attended all treatment sessions, their maths scores improved by 10%, which is comparable to 2-4 months of catch-up! Not only was the theory of change proven, but it also showed the intervention’s “supplementary” potential. It demonstrated that you could successfully focus on softer mindset shifts in parallel to curriculum implementation.

Now, Growth Mindset is a vital cog in the Education Department’s T2P strategy, which aims to target one million children in the next five years.

Mainstreaming: A vital catalyst for sustaining BI principles into the work of government

Mainstreaming our projects into the core work of government proved to be a fundamental lesson – especially when comparing them to our previously mentioned initiatives. Even though those projects produced meaningful impacts, they were “one-off” with no clear intention for mainstreaming in the future.

Indeed, the short-term nature of our early work was tied to the infancy of BI in our government. As a start, we cast our project net wide enough to first play around with BI as a policy game changer; accumulating implementation lessons for the future. As our BI footprint matured, the need for mainstreaming strategies became more and more clear.

Our advice for a mainstreaming strategy? Start with identifying and working closely with like-minded senior officials in your target department. Strong relationships pave the way for you to understand their priorities and how your BI initiative can be plugged in to add value. — Ammaarah Martinus

(Picture credit: Unsplash)