Meaning and power in the design and development of policy experiments

•Policy making deals with uncertainty in policy outputs and outcomes which can undermine policy effectiveness and complicate policy design.•Policy experiments and pilot projects have the potential to deal with many of these problems by isolating problematic elements of policy prior to full scale adoption.•But policy experimentation itself is not unproblematic and several barriers to experimentation stemming from struggles over meaning and power must be overcome.

Poorly designed or implemented policies impede a society's ability to adapt to changes in the policy environment. In order to avoid such situations, pilot projects and other forms of policy experiments can and are often used to test new approaches before their full-scale roll-out. Policy experimentation can provide meaning to policymaking by helping in framing or projecting the future, deriving alternate response strategies and monitoring any changes in the policy environment. At least in theory, the small scale and experimental nature of pilots can encourage policy innovations and reduce policy risks. The discussion in this paper examines three key challenges to policy experimentation all of which centre on questions of meaning in terms of understanding the future, and power in terms of the ability of governments to design and implement such actions. These are (1) the influence of politics and key stakeholders therein on the design and evaluation of experiments, (2) problems in the technical evaluation of policy experiments and (3) problems encountered in the diffusion of experiments and retaining the lessons drawn from them.