Behavioral Insights for Policy Design

Guilherme Lichand is Assistant Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, USA. His research is primarily about the sources of education inequities in low- and middle-income countries, and the interventions with potential to overturn them. He holds a PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University, USA. He has been acknowledged by the Schwab Foundation and Folha de São Paulo as Brazil's top-10 social entrepreneur of the year (post-COVID legacy), in 2020, and by MIT Technology Review as Brazil's top social innovator among under-35 entrepreneurs, in 2014. He is also a co-founder at Movva, a student success platform that uses behavioral insights to engage students and school communities to improve learning outcomes among low-income students across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Amiris de Paula Serdeira currently coordinates the Alliance for Literacy at the Natura Institute, Brazil. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics and a specialization in public management. She has worked with public policies with high social impact for over 8 years, with experience in strategic and project management, monitoring and evaluation, and policy design. Her research and experiences involve themes related to primary and secondary education, social innovation, and socioeconomic development in themes such as socioemotional development, literacy, impact evaluation, and designing innovative educational policies in public schools. Her work is focused on educational policy, especially in social impact project management and impact evaluation, having worked across several of the main education NGOs and private initiatives dedicated to improving public education in Brazil, including Ayrton Senna Institute, Insper, Oppen Social, and the Natura Institute.

Bruno Martins Rizardi is a designer and holds an MBA in project management.  He has worked with the design and implementation of public policies at the municipal, state, and national levels in Brazil. He has developed design-based methodologies to improve the way public programs are formulated and implemented. In particular, he has supported the structuring of programs across the Ministries of Education, Citizenship, Human Rights, and Economy.  He is a co-founder at Catálise Social, a consultancy company that uses collaborative approaches to create participatory public policies. He is the author of four other books on design and public policies. He is currently a Director at the Federal Ministry of Management and Public Service Innovation, Brazil.

Introduction.- Motivating the use of behavioral insights.- The rise and the fall of governmental nudge units.- Diagnosing behavioral mechanisms behind public.- Motivating the use of systems thinking.- Embedding behavioral diagnostics within systems thinking.- Augmenting the public management toolkit with behavioral insights: the PRIx framework.- Using behavioral insights in practice.- Best practices in testing behavioral mechanisms.- Designing for heterogeneous types.- Concluding remarks: the future of policy design.- A toolkit for policy teams.- Index.