ON THE surface, the National Development Plan is a strategy to achieve certain goals by 2030. But underneath it is something more profound: the first major initiative in South African policy making driven by evidence.
It was developed through research: a first “diagnostic” stage, identifying what is wrong in South Africa today and why; then a comprehensive plan to fix those things based on our best theories of what will work. But that is only the framework. The priority of evidence comes in monitoring and evaluation of policy over time — testing whether the interventions are working and whether others would work better.
Evidence-based policy has its intellectual roots in evidence-based medicine and has become an important tool of governments around the world in the past two decades. Its medical relative focuses on a single outcome: doing what leads to better health, irrespective of ideology. The paradigm case is that of a standoff between departments at the Great Hospital in Vienna in the 1840s. The hospital had two obstetric departments and women were allocated randomly between them. In one, patients were served by medical students who had just been working with dead bodies. In the other, women were served by midwives who had no contact with dead bodies. In the first department, the mortality rate was 18%, with fevers the main cause of death, but in the second it was 2%. A doctor at the hospital hypothesised that the higher mortality rate may be due to some contaminant being transferred from the dead bodies and introduced hand-washing with chlorine and lime. Lo and behold the mortality rate in the first department fell to the same levels of the second.
Inadvertently, the hospital had conducted the first randomised controlled trial, a research strategy that is now used widely across the medical sciences and increasingly in the social sciences. At that point the germ theory of disease was not widely accepted and there was significant dispute over what might be the reason for the results. But no one could dispute that the policy worked.
The example shows the distinction between theory and evidence which, in politics, allows for a distinction between policy and ideology.
Evidence-based policy making is not without its ideological foundations though. One of those is a belief in Pareto optimality: that if someone can be made better off, without someone else being made worse off, then we should act so as to bring about the welfare improvement. At heart this is a utilitarian principle, although most forms of utilitarianism go further, arguing that a policy may also be okay even if there are losers but there are more winners.
So, for example, expropriating land to build the Gautrain may have made some worse off, but the majority were left better off. This can obviously go too far — there are some rights we cannot violate for the sake of the majority, and our constitution strongly defends that. But, in general, it is clear that policy should aim to improve the lives of as many people as possible, without unfairly damaging the lives of anyone else.
The problem is that such an ideological position conflicts with others that people are strongly committed to. In South Africa we sometimes seem still set in an apartheid-era standoff where a win for my enemy is necessarily a loss to me. Anything that made the apartheid government stronger was bad for the liberation movement and vice versa. While the specifics have changed, an “us” and “them” way of looking at the world still seems common. This is reinforced by Marxist social conflict perspectives.
Karl Marx argued that classes are formed around common interests and are effectively at war with each other. His two main social groups were capital and labour and in the battle between them, a win for one was necessarily a loss for the other. The battle was about who should own the spoils of industrialisation. It is a zero-sum game. Labour’s interest is in capturing more of what Marx called “surplus value” from the capitalists, who are intent on exploiting labour and appropriating this value for themselves.
Many South African commentators seem to have inherited this Marxist way of viewing the world, which has no doubt contributed to our difficult labour relations, among other things. With individuals polarised into groups, convinced that any win for another is a defeat for themselves, a utilitarian view which prioritises the “better-offness” of individuals in a society can be viewed with suspicion.
Utilitarians would not favour a policy that benefited one group and left another group worse off; they would consider only the value to individuals, rather than the labels attached to them (though there are departures from this basic view such as prioritarianism which calls for special attention to be paid to the least well off). For those committed to a Marxist view, the labels really matter — there is an in-group defensive stance — and so policies are vigorously opposed that apparently make the other group better off. For the traditional Pareto-optimiser, the only group that is relevant is everyone, and success is when just one person in that group is made better off.
Ideological intransigence is not restricted to the left. Commentators on the right try to defend market fundamentalism, refusing to acknowledge that South Africa’s inequality and poverty levels require any non-market interventions. Such an ideological position is equally insensitive to evidence that market failure sustains unemployment and inequality grows without institutions and policies to counter it, particularly in light of South Africa’s apartheid legacy.
Interestingly, in the debates over the NDP, it is Cosatu that has done more research about the facts on the ground than organised business has, according to FirstRand CEO Sizwe Nxasana. So while labour is often accused of ideological posturing, some within the camp have done more to engage with the NDP on an evidence basis than has business. The same cannot be said, however, for Cosatu’s affiliate, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, which stands accused of rejecting the entire NDP because of specifics within it.
In part, evidence-based policy making is a response to political obstinacy in the face of ideological agendas.
The clashes over the youth wage subsidy, for instance, appear to be marked out on ideological grounds and evidence is not given priority.
The irony about such Marxist analysis is that Marx himself was a strong supporter of evidence. His concept of historical materialism emphasised material objective facts in the development of societies, rather than subjective concepts and views (though he thought scientists were influenced by ideological factors themselves). Marx saw empiricism as one way to undermine dominance by the elites: the facts don’t change simply because you have the power. The fact that Marxist commentators now prioritise ideological concepts over evidence would come as quite a shock to Marx.
The NDP attempts at the outset to lay a philosophical foundation of collective action to make the lives of individuals better as a joint enterprise. It sets the scene for a search for Pareto optimality through evidence-based policy, marrying the individualism of utilitarianism with shared responsibility. In its rather poetic introduction, the plan proclaims: “We say to one another: I cannot be without you, without you this South African community is an incomplete community, without one single person, without one single group, without the region or the continent, we are not the best we can be.” Such a statement is the complete antithesis of Marxist divisions of societies into classes with irreconcilable differences. Instead it calls to mind the principles of ubuntu, the idea that individual utility depends on the utility of others in a community.
Evidence-based policy cannot get out of the starting blocks if it doesn’t have a view on what the objective of policy should be. Planning minister Trevor Manuel argues that this objective is delivered by the constitution, which represents a set of values. These marry welfare and rights-based views: as many people as possible should be able to fulfil their maximum potential and no one should be left behind.
Of course, we can argue about just how to balance the rights of individuals with the need to maximise the welfare of the majority, but we have an excellent constitutional legal process to manage such disputes. The plan starts with a clear objective: “To eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by 2030.” The focus is on addressing underlying causes of poverty and inequality rather than the symptoms. That is why the emphasis is on education and infrastructure, building the capacity of individuals to take advantage of opportunity.
Because of the plan’s evidence-based philosophy, it is the performance monitoring and evaluation phase that will determine its long-term success. That is why within the presidency are both the planning commission and the department of performance monitoring and evaluation under minister Collins Chabane. While the plan represents the commissioners’ best views of what will work, it is an essential part of the process that its policies be tested and changed in light of evidence. Government has to become a learning organisation, with its implementers equipped with evidence-seeking skills and the ability to adapt policy in light of the evidence.
Of course, there are difficult problems within evidence-based frameworks too. There are significant disputes in all sciences about just what should count as evidence. Randomised controlled trials are often seen as the gold standard in evidence-based policy making, but it is often unclear just how to interpret such trials. If one intervention at one school works, it is not clear that it will work in all schools. Unlike in the case of medicines, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain just what the intervention in the affected group was, and how applicable success in one group is to others. There is also much room for dispute over what interventions should be tested first, and just how testing programmes should be designed. All these arguments rage in governments around the world that have attempted to reorient policy making around evidence and that will happen here as the philosophical approach embeds itself.
But these arguments are far healthier than the ones that have dominated policy discourse in South Africa. They call for a dialogue that quotes evidence and interrogates it rationally. They create a clear objective that all South Africans should be striving towards. If evidence counsels a change in course along that journey, then we are all better for it. Irrespective of the details of the NDP, it is this philosophical standpoint that needs the support of all South Africans.
• Theobald is MD of Intellidex and a PhD candidate in philosophy at the London School of Economics.
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