Feedback as a public policy intervention.Comparative analysis and serious game testing of change mechanisms in food waste policies.

The project aims to improve our understanding of feedback used as a policy intervention, and more specifically, its effectiveness in changing behaviors of policy addressees – individual citizens and organizations. We focus on policy interventions aimed at reducing food waste as food waste is a problem ubiquitous and pressing in all developed countries, which generates numerous policy efforts.

We apply a combination of methods. In order to identify the conditions that lead to successful food waste policies, we will compare 30 cases of interventions from the U.S. and the European Union. To understand dynamic mechanisms, which have enabled change among individuals and organizations, we will analyze the related processes in-depth. Finally, we will use two serious games to test what feedback characteristics work best. We will recreate the key change mechanisms, identified in study interventions, and run four quasi-experimental sessions with real policy participants in those games.

Our research will provide three major outcomes.

1. The project will advance our understanding of how we can use feedback to improve the individual and collective behaviors in the policy areas important to our societies.
2. It will provide practical illustrations, cases of effective food waste interventions and explain how and why they worked. That would allow for the potential replication of good practices in other contexts.
3. The project will extend our toolbox of policy analysis and design. It will offer methods for comparing policy interventions across countries, and it will promote the use of serious games for safe testing of different options of policy interventions.