Comparative or best practice studies are becoming, at least in my opinion, a very useful public policy design and planning tool. Most of the times we are hired by public administrations as consultants to deal some specific issue (recent examples are the improvement of researchers’ careers, the improvement of environmental risk management systems, and a region's position in the logistics market), to analyze what are doing other countries or regions always provides a very useful information and, very often, lessons and concrete ideas that can be implemented later by our client.
They say it was Stuart Mill who first formulated the comparative methodology; but since the late nineteenth century to today, this method has acquired a complexity that the English mathematician and philosopher would not have expected. This complexity is what allows the comparison of different societies or, in the case of policy, to compare different societies' answers to the same challenge or a similar situation, extrapolating ideas and conclusions of interest to the region or country for which we are working.
This research, in my opinion, greatly helps the manager, providing two main advantages. The fist of them is the knowledge of a long list of possible actions with which develop a concrete policy or pursue specific goals shared by organizations of other countries or regions that have been studied. The second input is a significant reduction of those inherent risks to any public action management, since A study of these features enables a priori rule out actions that may be interesting but in practice, implemented in other country or region, they have highlighted risks that have gone undetected if the study had not been carried. Finally, it allows the public manager to create a network, more or less formal, with other managers who faced daily with these challenge or issues.
To see a sample of comparative studies carried out lately, you can visit ‘exemplary projects’.
