This issue

– risk and rewards of public investments
– Indigenous evaluation strategy
– personalisation, disability and pandemics
– gender role attitudes
– COVID-19 digital contact tracing
Plus what I'm reading.

Research brief: The risks and rewards of public investments

A paper written by Andrea Laplane and Mariana Mazzucato in Research Policy: X discusses the role of the state as a risk taker and co-investor in innovation. It does this from the perspective of market co-creation where the state is not just fixing markets but co-creating them. Read our brief on the paper.

Reimagining Government

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the importance of governments in dealing with a society-wide crisis, but also provided us with an opportunity to rethink how they serve their citizens.

ANZSOG and the Centre for Public Impact are Reimagining Government in a series of six webinars, which will bring 

together senior practitioners, academics and leading thinkers from across the globe. These thinkers will be guided by the ‘enablement paradigm’ a belief that the best role for government is not to manage or control but to create the conditions that lead to good outcomes for society.

Have your say: Indigenous evaluation strategy 

Despite decades of policies and programs aimed at improving the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, too little is known about their impact. The evaluation of such initiatives has often been an afterthought or not done at all. 

The Productivity Commission has released a draft Indigenous evaluation strategy which sets out a more systematic approach aimed at improving the quality of evaluation. It provides principles-based guidance for when planning, conducting and using evaluations of policies and programs affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. 

Guiding principles 

The overarching principle of the Strategy is centring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perspectives, priorities and knowledges. 

It is also about building genuine partnerships to: 

• define policy and program outcomes 

• decide on evaluation questions, how evaluations will be conducted and how evaluation findings will be interpreted.  

The overarching principle is also the lens through which the Strategy’s other principles — credible, useful, ethical and transparent — are interpreted.  

Have your say 

The Commission consulted widely when developing the draft Strategy, including with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, communities and organisations. Further feedback is invited on the draft strategy and submissions are due on 3 August 2020. 

The outbreak of a pandemic provokes fear and risk of ill health for all individuals. A paper in Disability & Society from academics at the University of New South Wales and University of Melbourne argues these events pose even more of a threat to people with disability.  

People living with disability (PLWD) often have poorer health outcomes because of underlying conditions and difficulties in accessing health and other services. Recent changes to the structure and operation of disability services in Australia may have left PLWD even more vulnerable in the face of major global challenges such as COVID-19. 

What are the changes? 

Disability services have undergone significant reform. PLWD have argued for greater choice and control over the design and delivery of services they access. A one-size-fits-all approach to service delivery cannot effectively meet the needs and desires of the broad range of disabilities. 

There has also been a push to personalise services. This can involve: 

• supporting greater self-direction of care services 

• working through individual priorities to tailor services 

• setting a personal budget which is given as a cash payment to self-manage. 

When personalisation and pandemic collide 

A pandemic can place PLWD at risk. Personalisation makes it difficult to identify the workforce, train them in infection control, mobilise supplies to all who need these and upscale the workforce in face of shortages in care workers. 

Under more traditional systems of care, governments had a degree of control over the workforce and levers to do things differently. There are fewer options for control in a personalised system. 

Do parents pass their gender role attitudes onto their children? 

Traditional gender beliefs play a role in (re-) producing gender inequalities. A new Life Course Centre working paper investigates the impact of intergenerational family influences on Australian adolescents’ gender role attitudes. It analyses data from a national sample of Australian 14 and 15-year-old adolescents.  

Key findings 

• There are substantial correlations in gender role attitudes between parents and their children.  

• Fathers’ attitudes influence the attitudes of their sons and daughters equally. 

• Mothers’ attitudes influence their daughters more than their sons – highlighting the role of mothers in the gender socialisation of daughters.  
• When one parent holds egalitarian gender role attitudes (regardless of that parent’s gender), the influence of the other parent’s attitudes on the child is diminished. 
• Egalitarianism appears to trump traditionalism when there is parental disagreement on gender role attitudes. 

If reducing gender biases is a policy goal, the findings indicate interventions that target parents will have significant flowon effects for the next generation. 

COVID-19 digital contact tracing: a policy primer 

A working paper from Auckland University of Technology and the University of Queensland has found digital contact tracing solutions for COVID-19 must offer exceptional speed and high take-up rates to be valuable. 

Even before a patient becomes symptomatic, the epidemiological features of COVID-19 mean they may have already infected a significant number of people. Therefore, contact tracing solutions must offer instantaneous notifications. The research also found take-up levels need to be above 60 per cent for digital contact tracing to add significant value. 

Given the need for high uptake, the researchers found that building and maintaining social licence for the use of digital tools is critical. Governments need to demonstrate that the value to the user is high and that privacy and security risks are low. 

Because users have limited ability to judge the value of contact tracing tools, high trust is needed to achieve high take-up levels. The researchers suggest governments commit to an impact evaluation that will allow citizens to judge the impact of a tool. This could increase trust as well as take-up. 

‘Til the next issue

Maria Katsonis