Who watches the watchmen? Biases of policy professionals

Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR) hosted its twentieth Lahore Policy Exchange talk on Understanding societal failure in providing clean drinking water. Policy professionals play a central role in translating data and research into policy options and in guiding decision-making. Policy professionals are contractually obligated to engage with data objectively and impartially to achieve optimum policy outcomes. Underlying the evidence revolution in development economics is an assumption that policy makers can put this evidence to use. However, a vast literature from Psychology and Economics demonstrates how difficult it is to disentangle decisions from biases and how decisions do not follow from data in a straight forward manner. Using the context of health and poverty, coupled with data from samples from elite institutions, the following speakers will discuss how biases stem from having a particular worldview, often with ideological origins; how they translate into decisions; how policy makers face structural and analytical constraints in using evidence; and measures policy professionals can use to mitigate the impact of biases and other constraints on decisions.