Designing Behavioural Insights for Policy: Processes, Capacities and InstitutionsBy IshaniMukhurjee and AsselMussagulova, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: UK, 2024. 84 pp. 23. ISBN: 978‐1‐00‐926446‐4

Much scholarship on Behavioral Public Policy focuses on questions of ethics, effectiveness, and implementation (Einfeld 2025). Designing Behavioural Insights for Policy: Processes, Capacities and Institutions from Ishani Mukhurjee and Assel Mussagulova brings a new perspective to an under-theorized area of scholarship, focusing on the policy design, instrumentation, and innovation of behavioral insights. Designing Behavioural Insights for Policy is a Cambridge Element, which are succinct academic publications that sit in length between a traditional book and a journal article. The use of Behavioral Public Policy continues to grow. The approach has been described as a “paradigm shift” by the OECD, and there are now over 300 behavioral insights teams around the world (OECD 2023). Academic scholarship is also increasingly attending to behavioral insights (Leong and Howlett 2020). This scholarship has focused on defining behavioral insights and evaluating outcomes, with less attention paid to the administrative processes in the design and decisions to use behavioral public policy. This Element theorizes the support needed to embed behavioral insights in policy practice. It asks the compelling question “What are the key capacity and procedural prerequisites for the integration of BI into the design of policy tools?” It proceeds to answer the question through a framework that brings together theory on policy capacity, policy design and tools, and policy innovation. In doing so it makes a useful contribution to the policy and public administration literature, building on the authors' expertise in these areas. Ishani Mukherjee is a policy expert who has written extensively on policy design, as well as policy advice and policy capacity. The Element also demonstrates Assel Mussagulova's expertise in public administration and innovation. The authors cleverly bring their knowledge together with the hopes of developing more nuance in policy design with regards to rationality, and a more rigorous understanding of the tools in behavioral insights. Chapter 1 introduces behavioral insights in the policy design and instrumentation literature. The authors argue convincingly that policy design and instrumentation is one approach that would help theorize behavioral public policy processes, while also enriching the policy design literature by developing a more nuanced account of assumptions of rationality in policy communities. Chapter 2 then identifies the limited engagement between behavioral public policy and policy design theory. The chapter provides an overview of Hood and Margetts (2007) influential NATO framework, considering the role of behavior in Nodality, Authority, Treasury, and Organization. The authors note the gap theorizing the organizational design and administration of behavioral public policy and introduce the role of procedural tools and the analytical capacities. Chapter 3 considers the capacity requirements using the framework of innovation adoption. Each stage of innovation adoption is examined and considered in light of the institutionalization of behavioral insights, an analysis they develop in their case studies in Chapter 4. These case studies of the Netherlands, Australia, and Singapore are well-researched areas of behavioral insights adoption, with the countries enthusiastically leading the way in institutionalization of the approach. Australia provides an example of a structured collaborative approach, the Netherlands a networked, bottoms-up approach, and Singapore as a centrally supported networked approach. Chapter 5 re-emphasizes the gap in the literature on the lack of theory of the administrative requirements to support BI. It offers a framework that can be used to understand the different capacities and capabilities needed in a typical project, before highlighting some of the remaining puzzles, including the need to categorize different behavioral tools. Designing Behavioural Insights for Policy represents an impressive effort to marry academic scholarship on the form of behavioral public policy and practice literature on the experience of using behavioral insights, clearly identifying the gap of using policy design theory with behavioral insights. The case studies are well chosen, given that the Netherlands, Australia, and Singapore were all at the forefront of the development and adoption of behavioral public policy. It would be interesting in the future to compare this to other bureaucracies, particularly in the global south with different administrative contexts. The authors aim for neutrality and deliberately do not engage in the raging ethical, normative and political debates on behavioral insights, beyond a brief mention of politics in the case studies. Greater engagement with more critical work might have enriched the work further. Foregrounding the ethical and political reasons why behavioral insights may or may not assume the same innovation trajectory or institutionalization in different contexts would make the theoretical framework more compelling. The Element covers policy capacity, policy design and tools, and innovation adoption. In providing the necessary summaries and justifications of including these theories to develop insights, Designing Behavioural Insights for Policy struggles for space to develop its application and analysis to behavioral insights. For example, in the Netherlands case, the authors note that organizational arrangements and political support for a more formal approach to behavioral public policy came later, but include limited examination of what capacity was needed for this organizational support and what institutional contestations and challenges were faced. In bringing together so many concepts, the commitment to exploring these in the context of behavioral public policy is somewhat left diluted. The short form of the Element may also be why other interesting questions, such as the need to conceptualize the proliferation of behavioral public policy tools, were ultimately left as remaining puzzles. Focusing on fewer theoretical frameworks and deeper engagement with behavioral public policy would brought greater balance to the Element. Nonetheless, Designing Behavioural Insights for Policy demonstrates an innovative approach to theory development in bringing together multiple policy theories to develop new understandings of policy processes. The author declares no conflicts of interest.