Responsive Small Project
Further to the Round 2 call, there was a specific need identified to engage with the DfE in Northern Ireland; a responsive project was therefore funded in this area.
Responsive Small Project
Mapping the Cognitive Landscape of Productivity in Northern Ireland: A Systems Approach to Understanding Productivity Policy
Project Lead: Dr Jen Nelles
Like the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland has experienced weak productivity growth since the 2008 Financial Crisis despite broader economic recovery. Consequently, boosting productivity has been a central goal of contemporary economic policy even to the extent that both UK and Northern Ireland industrial strategies have been described as productivity policies. Yet evidence shows that decades of Government productivity policies have not (yet?) resulted in predictable or positive impacts on productivity performance. We argue that developing policies to effectively influence productivity outcomes requires the kind of broad and multidimensional approaches advocated by both industrial strategies. However, we suggest that an institutional bias towards thinking in terms of policy silos has prevented policy makers from identifying and acting upon opportunities for joined-up policy design and governance. Instead, we argue that the productivity puzzle may be more effectively addressed by conceptualising using a systems approach in which the economy, and policy space, is conceptualised as a system whose functioning, interactions, and interdependencies should be understood as a whole as part of the policy process. This project is an exploratory attempt to apply a systems perspective in the context of Northern Ireland productivity policy to generate a map of how policy makers perceive the economic system. Through this process, we highlight gaps, biases, and potential opportunities for developing a more refined model of the system to underpin future policy interventions.
