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Advocates of abundance have identified “failed public policy” as an increasingly significant barrier to growth. State and local policies that fail to effectively deliver critically important public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, and growth-oriented infrastructure are of particular concern.

Part of the challenge is that we have far too few rigorous evaluations of the efficacy of state and local policies and programs. For example, the American Rescue Plan, the largest one-time federal investment in state and local governments in the last century, provided $350 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds to state, territorial, local, and tribal governments to accelerate post-pandemic economic recovery. Yet very few of those investments are being evaluated for efficacy.

But another part of the challenge is that state and local governments often don’t adopt more effective policies even when shown rigorous evidence that these policies are more effective than status quo policies. We need not only to identify policies that are better than existing policies, but also to support the implementation of those policies. In the words of Ezra Klein, we need not only to “imagin[e] the policies that a capable government could execute,” but also to “imagin[e] how to make a government capable of executing them.”

We can do better than imagination. A growing body of research on the evidence-to-policy pipeline is documenting factors that increase the likelihood that state and local governments will implement evidence-based policy reform. First, government decision makers are more likely to adopt evidence-based policy reforms when they are grounded in local evidence and/or recommended by local researchers. A Boston-based study showing that relaxing density restrictions reduces rents and house prices will do less to convince San Francisco decision makers than either a San Francisco-based study or San-Francisco based researchers endorsing the evidence from Boston. Localized experimentation can also confirm that a good idea in one context is translatable to others. 

Second, government decision makers are more likely to adopt evidence-based policy reforms when they are engaged as partners in the research projects that produce the evidence of efficacy, helping to define the set of feasible policy alternatives, design new policy interventions, and overcome implementation challenges. 

Third, the way we communicate evidence to policymakers also matters for government innovation. Providing policymakers with side-by-side estimates of the social returns to alternative policies increases their responsiveness to evidence. 

These strategies have been used in the past to produce a remarkable degree of state and local government innovation. At the turn of the century, state and local governments partnered with the nation’s emerging research universities to develop and test science-based methods to more effectively deliver public services, including innovative systems to safely dispose of waste and purify drinking water. Local governments’ adoption of clean water technologies alone was largely responsible for striking decreases in mortality well before the invention of modern antibiotics and vaccines, contributing to mid-century economic growth. But as federal funding for basic science research grew after WWII, the nation’s preeminent research universities largely turned away from the contract-based applied research that had served the needs of state and local governments, leaving these governments without their innovation partners. 

In partnership with the 86 campuses in the Social Science Research Council’s College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, we are leveraging the emerging research findings about the determinants of government innovation, as well as the historical record of successful innovation partnerships between universities and state and local governments, to define a set of evidence-based Agenda Fund initiatives designed to accelerate state and local government innovation.

Accelerating Innovation in
State and Local Governments

Advocates of abundance have identified “failed public policy” as an increasingly significant barrier to growth. State and local policies that fail to effectively deliver critically important public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, and growth-oriented infrastructure are of particular concern. 

Part of the challenge is that we have far too few rigorous evaluations of the efficacy of state and local policies and programs. For example, the American Rescue Plan, the largest one-time federal investment in state and local governments in the last century, provided $350 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds to state, territorial, local, and tribal governments to accelerate post-pandemic economic recovery. Yet very few of those investments are being evaluated for efficacy.

But another part of the challenge is that state and local governments often don’t adopt more effective policies even when shown rigorous evidence that these policies are more effective than status quo policies. We need not only to identify policies that are better than existing policies, but also to support the implementation of those policies. In the words of Ezra Klein, we need not only to “imagin[e] the policies that a capable government could execute,” but also to “imagin[e] how to make a government capable of executing them.”

We can do better than imagination. A growing body of research on the evidence-to-policy pipeline is documenting factors that increase the likelihood that state and local governments will implement evidence-based policy reform. First, government decision makers are more likely to adopt evidence-based policy reforms when they are grounded in local evidence and/or recommended by local researchers. A Boston-based study showing that relaxing density restrictions reduces rents and house prices will do less to convince San Francisco decision makers than either a San Francisco-based study or San-Francisco based researchers endorsing the evidence from Boston. Localized experimentation can also confirm that a good idea in one context is translatable to others. 

Second, government decision makers are more likely to adopt evidence-based policy reforms when they are engaged as partners in the research projects that produce the evidence of efficacy, helping to define the set of feasible policy alternatives, design new policy interventions, and overcome implementation challenges. 

Third, the way we communicate evidence to policymakers also matters for government innovation. Providing policymakers with side-by-side estimates of the social returns to alternative policies increases their responsiveness to evidence. 

These strategies have been used in the past to produce a remarkable degree of state and local government innovation. At the turn of the century, state and local governments partnered with the nation’s emerging research universities to develop and test science-based methods to more effectively deliver public services, including innovative systems to safely dispose of waste and purify drinking water. Local governments’ adoption of clean water technologies alone was largely responsible for striking decreases in mortality well before the invention of modern antibiotics and vaccines, contributing to mid-century economic growth. But as federal funding for basic science research grew after WWII, the nation’s preeminent research universities largely turned away from the contract-based applied research that had served the needs of state and local governments, leaving these governments without their innovation partners. 

The Social Science Research Council is supporting the members of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences in leveraging the emerging research findings about the determinants of government innovation, as well as the historical record of successful innovation partnerships between universities and state and local governments, to define a set of evidence-based initiatives designed to accelerate state and local government innovation.

Accelerating Innovation in State and Local Governments

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