by Phillip Ward
6 minute read
I’m looking forward to the National Recycling Awards on 3rd July for which I am one of the judges. It’s always a lively evening and a great networking event. They even gave me an award once.
But I have thought for a while that something is missing from this and other award ceremonies I go to. If the original aims of awards schemes include identifying good practice and innovation and encouraging its application and development, then some of that is getting lost in the present format of the events – fun though they are.
Gong and soon forgotten
An experiment – admittedly one I haven’t yet tried – puts the problem in the spotlight. I would bet that if on the morning after an award ceremony you asked a group of attendees to name the winners, most would not be able to – unless they happened to be holding a prize themselves. And I am absolutely confident that they would not be able to say why the award had been given or what they could learn from it. Those details are generally not provided on the night, and rarely brought out later. This is less a matter of alcoholic amnesia than the fact that the commercial need for lots of awards and a glittering occasion squeezes out any information about why the winners have been chosen.
If award ceremonies aren’t the most effective way to transfer knowledge within the resource sector, we need to consider the alternatives. With the government seemingly committed to continuing austerity and big changes facing the sector, it doesn’t really make sense to keep asking hundreds of separate organisations to invent their own wheels. Yet that is what we have largely done for years. It is what happened with the move from landfill to recycling. The result is a patchwork of disparate services across local authorities, leading to widely differing standards of service and big variations in effectiveness.
Not only do these frustrate consumers and industry; they also waste money. It takes management time to devise schemes and their small scale breeds inefficiency, for example through needing to have a wide range of vehicles and containers on the market. Ministers only make matters worse by talking of letting a thousand flowers bloom or choosing horses for courses. But a flower in the wrong place is a weed, while choosing horses for courses is what punters dream of and bookies get rich on, not a model for efficient policy development.
Of course there is a gradual process of consolidation going on, as services are reviewed and research is assimilated by consultants and practitioners. But it makes for a slow, costly, and unreliable route to best practice.
A better model?
Elsewhere the government and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) have recognised weaknesses in the development of good practice, by announcing the intention to fund the creation of four new ‘What Works’ centres. These centres will work in areas where an evidence base exists, in the UK or overseas, but has not been systematically analysed or widely communicated. They will assess the published evidence on the effectiveness of different approaches using a common ‘currency’ and share findings in an accessible way with practitioners and policy makers.
But these centres will work only on social policy, covering:
- crime reduction,
- local economic growth,
- ageing and
- early intervention.
Despite the importance of resources and the green economy and the political salience of waste services, there is no equivalent proposal from Defra or the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC). Perhaps the engagement of Mr Pickles means that evidence based policy is a bit awkward in this area.
But it is a pity that there is no proposal. Some of the elements planned for the new centres would be very valuable, not least a common currency for assessing different approaches. It’s not that evaluation does not happen in the waste sector but there is certainly no standard approach. Different drivers are of significance to different groups, and consequently results are at best less persuasive than they might be and at worst actively disputed. One of the useful jobs done by the proposed centres will be to identify the circumstances in which different approaches are most appropriate, based on evidence rather than prejudice.
WRAP and role
While Defra is contemplating the results of its review of WRAP, they might add this to their thinking. WRAP has already done a great deal to review and codify good practice in some areas. It has a considerable evaluation capability and could develop a broader ‘what works’ role. There would be some necessary conditions:
- It would need to have the same independence from government as is proposed for the other centres, possibly with similar access to funding from the research councils and the Big Lottery Fund.
- It would need to be connected to the other centres so that comparable approaches and standards could be developed
- The governance arrangements for this activity would probably need to be broadened to get a broad buy-in to the process and commitment to use the results
- Government would need to commit to using the evidence to inform policy.
Of course, producing the evidence is only the first part of the story. Getting it read and acted on is another question. We are at an interesting crossroads here too. Traditional training courses are dead or dying. From an employer’s point of view they are too expensive and time consuming. For Generation Y employees, PowerPoint presentations in a hotel conference room seem a bit old hat. Conferences increasingly provide a welter of speakers with 15 minute slots to pitch their ideas or experience but no real opportunity to pass on knowledge.
The substitute for these traditional channels is the internet, but like the classic “case study” approach, without quality assurance this can be just as effective at passing on bad practice as good. The latest attempt to bridge the communication gulf seems to be the Massive Open Online Course or MOOC . These are designed to make accredited training available to anyone that wants it, with only the optional accreditation at the end being charged for. The Ellen McArthur Foundation, among others, is experimenting with this approach.
In my experience it has proved hard to get a real debate about this going in the waste sector. But somehow, we need to get some consensus on how good practice is to be identified and taken up in setting policy and implementing it.
In the meantime it would be good to share a bit more information about the winners of the National Recycling Awards next week once the celebrations are over.
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