By Kate Mattocks

Governments around the world undertake policy experiments – temporary, often micro-level interventions – to try new things and ‘learn what works.’ But what makes an experiment successful? This is the question I explore in my recent article published in Policy & Politics.

Discussions of success are surprisingly absent from the literature. We might think of success as a positive hypothesis: i.e. achieving an expected result. But this doesn’t capture all of the possible outcomes of experiments, and it also doesn’t consider the process of carrying them out.

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