Translating research into policy and legislative change

The power of information, inducements, rewards, and environments means that individual behaviour change has limited capacity to generate population-level behaviour change. Understanding the needs and challenges of politicians and legislators and helping them plan and instigate well-specified, rewarding actions can generate effective community and political behaviour change. For example, perhaps the most effective health-related behaviour change intervention in recent times was legislation to ban cigarette smoking in public places. This did not depend on persuading individual smokers that they wanted to stop smoking in public places.

At MCBC, we develop interventions that translate policy aspirations into concrete action plans to create new legislative environments.