Governing mindfully: shaping policy makers’ emotional engagements with behaviour change

Abstract

The behaviour change agenda also changes the nature of policy making insofar as the forms of expertise and insight required in some senses are claimed to ‘rehumanise’ the policy making process. This means that policy makers themselves are required to collect behavioural insight on their target audiences/citizens, pay more attention to how policies will be implemented in light of apparently improved understandings of the human condition, and design policies which are emotionally informed (e.g. Dolan et al., 2010). This chapter investigates how policy makers are engaging with behaviour change knowledge, including how this engagement resonates with the emotional demands already placed upon them within their working lives in the public sector. In doing so, it considers this increasing influence of behavioural insights on the policy making process alongside the contemporary focus on workplace wellbeing, which is one sector in which theories from behavioural science have been mobilised to change workers’ behaviour and organisational cultures. Thus civil servants in the UK context and elsewhere are coming into contact directly and indirectly with both of these current trends.

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