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If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The modern version of this conundrum cropped up last year in an unlikely setting, when researchers at the World Bank decided to find out who was reading their policy reports, which are stored as PDFs on their website. In 4 years, from 2008 to 2012, nearly a third of these reports had never been downloaded. Another 40% had been downloaded less than a hundred times.
This may say something about the readability of World Bank reports; still, their fate is hardly unique. For most people, “reading” a policy report means reading the Executive Summary. “Reading deeply” means reading the recommendations as well. Writing last month from the world’s biggest “wonkathon,” the Think Tank Initiative Exchange, IPPR’s Head of News quoted an MP from Tanzania, a Presidential candidate from Guinea Bissau, a former Education Minister from Costa Rica and a British civil servant at DFID: “all agree on one thing: they don’t actually read the full reports.”
