“Since their infancy, impact assessments have progressed to the point where they enable politicians to make objectively justified decisions and explain why they do not always proceed with populist options. If we learn from our early mistakes and the world’s experience, we could progress towards having the world’s best policies. That will happen when all policies are preceded by independently and expertly produced SEIAs and followed by monitoring and error-correction”.
Helping the government make informed decisions: Leon Louw’s latest column in BDlive published by Business Day.
Further excerpts
Governments routinely squander resources and erode liberty by passing laws without prior evidence that they are likely to be effective. They neither want nor get feedback on real world consequences. The machinery of government is designed to make laws regardless of need or impact. Legislatures legislate, executives execute and judiciaries adjudicate. There is no institutionalised error-correction. None of the three branches of government has an organ of state designed to monitor the extent to which intentions materialise. None of the institutions of government is designed to identify and repeal or reform failed measures, which partly explains the conspicuous incompetence of governments.
It also explains why regulatory impact assessments were invented. Socio-Economic Impact Assessments (SEIAs) became mandatory in 2016. It could be one of the most important developments in our history, yet scarcely anyone knows it happened. Hitherto, laws were passed at the behest of bureaucratic or political whim without objective evidence of probable or actual consequences.
We now have a SEIA Unit in the planning department to ensure that SEIAs precede laws and policies. About 120 have been done. Few have been released and all were done by the worst people to do them, officials with selfish bureaucratic interests.