"It is easy to focus on the stability that may be evident at home, while overlooking developments elsewhere." Photo: Burning oil fields, Iraq. Susannah George / AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Recent decades have seen a dramatic growth in the literature on complex systems. Much of this has developed in mathematics, and in the natural and computational sciences. Increasingly however, this approach is gaining traction in the social sciences. This has in many ways been a breath of fresh air. Drawing upon dynamic models from the natural sciences that can be extremely fertile in suggesting new insights for the social sciences, introducing models such as tipping points, bifurcations and co-evolving systems. It has created much greater interest in the non-linear dynamics of the social world - and in the macro-patterns that emerge unexpectedly from the micro-interactions in which we are all involved.
Nevertheless, in applying these perspectives to the social world, we need to take care. The ways we interact involve us exercising and contesting power. All this also involves uncertainty – and efforts by the powerful to offload that uncertainty onto others. Yet these have been rather neglected by much of the complexity writing within the social sciences.
Policy-making
Evidence-based policy-making brings together robust evidence about the outcome or impact of a particular intervention. Evidence is collected, evaluated and aggregated – ‘systematically reviewed’ - across as wide a range of contexts as possible. The gold standard remains the randomised controlled trial. The prominence given to this gold standard can be explained in part by its high status within medical science and clinical practice. What may also be relevant is the ascendancy of the 'contract culture' for the commissioning of public services from multiple providers. Contracts need to specify the impacts against which the service providers will be judged, and therefore depend on the establishment of an evidence base for such impact (and a policy research community that endorses such an approach). This may also explain why impacts which can be couched in terms of ‘behaviour change’ are especially attractive, if they seem readily identifiable and measurable.
