Assessing Uncertainties and Risk to Policy Reform

With policy-focussed research, it is particularly important that analysis shifts from the analysis of poverty to the analysis of policy interventions and their likely impact on poverty. Risk assessment is an end-of-exercise reflection on the uncertainties and risks that surround policy reform, compelling us to make transparent the assumptions we are making about policy reform and its impacts. Once we have done a PSIA, how confident are we then that the predicted impacts will occur, and what are the assumptions we are making upon which our impact predictions are based? In this section we describe the role that social risk assessment can play in utilising PSIA data and analysis to identify and map the risks to policy reform. Then we describe how considering scenarios to handle uncertainty can help us choose the policy option that is most likely to result in our desired outcome.