Creation of the Behavioral Sciences and Public Policies Unit
We are particularly pleased to announce that the INECO Foundation, together with the Inter-American Development Bank, participated in the launch event of the Behavioral Sciences and Public Policy Unit, an initiative of the Economic and Social Council that will function under the coordination of the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs. Strategies of the Nation and in which the Foundation has been collaborating for its realization.
The objective of the Unit is to promote public policy projects based on studies of human behavior. The premise is to study how small changes in context can bring great benefits in people’s lives. Investigating how human beings make decisions (Spoiler Alert: many times it is not in the rational way that we would like so much) can help to design public policies that are low-cost to implement and have a great impact on the well-being of the entire society.
The Behavioral Sciences and Public Policies Unit will be made up of a network of experts in various disciplines and will seek to articulate research with government programs. Since 2018, the INECO Foundation has been working together with the IDB in a technical cooperation whose horizon is precisely to promote research in behavioral sciences throughout Latin America with the aim of developing policies that can positively impact people’s lives. The fact that this synergy has crystallized into a state policy that generates interventions at a very low cost and with a very high impact in the medium and long term fills us with pride and puts us before a challenge: to continue developing research of the highest quality and deepen the dissemination tasks on the potential of these tools.