Good morning distinguished guests, friends and colleagues.

Thank you all for attending this conference.

It is entitled “Revistings”. We are revisiting Meritocracy, Housing, Pluralism, and our Social Compact.

We ought to revisit IPS too — as befitting our 35th anniversary. For the purpose of this conference, I asked IPS to interview some people. We deliberately set out to interview those likely to be critical, if not astringent — “loving critics”, to quote Professor Tommy Koh, our Special Adviser.  

They all have had associations with IPS. Some — like Professors Chua Beng Huat, Linda Lim and Paulin Straughan — have participated in our conferences and/or research projects. Prof Lim Siong Guan, the former Head of the Civil Service, was the 4th S R Nathan Fellow. Professor Cherian George was an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow. And Mr Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh was one of the co-authors of the paper on inequality that anchored the 2012 Singapore Perspectives Conference.

Some of our “loving critics” are less emollient than others. But no matter. We take all their views seriously. Longer extracts of the interviews we conducted with all those featured in the video are available on IPS’s YouTube channel.

IPS is a government-funded public policy think tank. We get an annual grant from the government. Many of the research projects we conduct are commissioned by government agencies. Of especial importance to us is the one-to-one matching grant we receive from the Ministry for Education for every dollar we raise from donors.

One of our former directors, Arun Mahizhnan defined our relations with the government thus: “IPS is close to the government but not part of the government.”[1] Close; but not part of. That distance (not part of) is as important as that proximity (close).

Our main business has always been and remains public policy. Not politics — policy: Examining policy, discussing policy, publishing on policy, conducting surveys on various matters pertinent to policy, and providing platforms for a wide variety of stakeholders to meet on policy — like conferences, seminars, workshops, citizen juries, deliberative polling, and what not.

We have been innovative in pursuing some of this work. For example, we have conducted two major scenario planning exercises — IPS Prism in 2012, which culminated in an immersive arts experience, including forum theatre, curated by the playwright Kok Heng Leun. Another scenario planning exercise, Reimagining Singapore 2030, is ongoing.

Other things I might mention are:

• One: The citizens’ panels or juries that IPS has organised — most recently on employment resilience (including unemployment insurance). It was funded by Ngee Ann Kongsi.

• Two: The biennial Young Singaporeans Conference — an always lively and enlivening event, organised for the most part by our young research assistants for other young Singaporeans.

• Three: The 50-volume Singapore Chronicles series on all and sundry topics concerning Singapore — from our flora and fauna to food; from the economy to foreign policy; from PAP to Opposition; from Emergency to Separation. The Chronicles series, I am glad to announce, remains live — with new editions of current titles plus additional ones being planned.

• And four: The recently-established IPS Programme on Race, Religion, and Intergroup Cohesion (RRIC),supported by The Silent Foundation. This is an empirically-based programme to promote awareness of, and competence in managing, racial, religious, and intergroup cohesion. 

Ten years ago, on our 25th anniversary, IPS numbered 31.  Now, on our 35th anniversary, we number 114 — an almost four-fold growth.

In 2013, we had barely started IPS Social Lab, which collects sentiments and behavioural data. Now, Social Lab alone exceeds 45.

Ten years ago, we did not have the IPS Policy Lab, which conducts pilots and policy experiments. Policy Lab is beginning to do interesting work, with eight research staff.

Together with Social Lab and Policy Lab, IPS’s Society and Culture and the Governance and Economy departments have continued to grow and deepen over the years. Collectively, we focus on four areas of research: Managing Diversities, Inequality and Social Mobility, Managing the Challenges and Opportunities of an Ageing Society, and Governance of a City-State.

When IPS began 35 years ago, it was about the only think tank or public policy research unit in town, beside the grand dame ISEAS. Now we have many more research institutions and think tanks — including ones specialising in particular subjects, like water and energy; and many devoted to regional or area studies, from the East Asia Institute to the Middle East Institute. As a result, IPS today, compared to the IPS of 35 years ago, has come to focus almost exclusively on domestic matters.

Ever since we established Social Lab — and now Policy Lab — IPS has been moving in a new direction: Not only researching, talking and writing about policy, but also experimenting with policy, testing policy ideas, running pilots, figuring out what might work and what doesn’t.

Our people have done some interesting, valuable work in these areas, but we are still only at the foothills. Not just IPS; the whole field of public policy. There is a great deal more we can do — in government as well as public policy institutions — to adopt an empirical approach to policy-making: testing proposals before they are adopted, let alone scaled up; building a body of knowledge on policy implementation and outcomes; constantly tweaking policies with the view of improving them; and thereby improving the lives of our fellow citizens.

Over the last two years, 2022 and 2023, Social Lab alone has undertaken 35 unique projects — 26 of them conducting the research and analysis as well as collecting the data. Alas, less than half of this work has been published, such being the terms of the commissions and grants we receive.

Social Lab’s projects are too numerous to detail. I’ll only mention a few:

• PATHS (short for Pathways and Trajectories of Households in Singapore), which tracks the long-term experiences and outcomes of 5,000 households here, including their employment and children’s development.

• Youth STEPS (short for Study on Transitions and Evolving Pathways in Singapore), which tracks over 3000 youth, examining their educational and career pathways.

• A project in partnership with Mendaki to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention programme to empower low-income Malay-Muslim parents to prepare their pre-school children for Maths.

• And finally, something we are most proud of, two surveys examining the motivations, stressors and needs of Private Hire Vehicle Drivers and Food Delivery Riders. Our young researchers — research assistants and associates — were very involved in this project. As a result of their passion, IPS contributed to government efforts to improve the working conditions of platform workers.

This is only one example of the useful work we can do. It is not just a matter of producing research papers, as valuable as those are. It is also about mobilising the passion and idealism of young researchers to improve policy — to make life just a little better for our fellow Singaporeans.

I will only mention a few of Policy Lab’s projects, to give you a sense of the possibilities here:

• Piloting programmes to better integrate people with disabilities in their neighbourhoods.

• Offering debt-relief to low-income families.

• A policy experiment to determine if alternative forms of organisation using decentralised decision-making and governance can better achieve collective goals, social outcomes and administrative effectiveness.

• A three-year partnership with Tote Board to improve the capabilities of non-profit organisations.

I might mention a few other initiatives in the pipeline:

• Recently, Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam launched Tote Board’s $6 million Future Ready Society Impact Fund. The Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities will focus on Futures Research to identity opportunity areas, while IPS Policy Lab will incubate solutions in partnerships across the public, private and people sectors.

• IPS itself is working on establishing a Social Compact Outcomes Fund which will adopt “Outcomes-Based Financing” (OBF) principles. The fund will pay for programmes that achieve verifiable results.

• Related to these, Policy Lab will build a Knowledge Hub that includes an ideas bank, evidence reviews and evaluation studies — a sort of ‘What Works’ centre that practitioners can access to determine what solutions are worth implementing.

• And finally, Policy Lab is working on creating a Solutions Exchange to list promising, ready-to-implement projects so that good ideas can find funders.

Our business is public policy, I said, not politics. And yet we cannot avoid politics. Singapore’s political landscape is bound to become more contested — in time, perhaps even fractured. It is urgent various bodies in the civil space create and guard common spaces, so people can meet regardless of political affiliations.

IPS is one such space in the area of public policy. To paraphrase T.H. Huxley: Sit down before fact as a little child. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly where the facts may lead — with no regard to what one side or the other in the political sphere might think.

Those are not easy ideals to live by. We can only try. Sometimes, our findings are cited favourably by the ruling party. Sometimes, they are cited favourably by the opposition. Either way, it hasn’t mattered; it shouldn’t.

Will IPS still be around in 10, 20 or 30 years? Well, if we remain of use to the public service, to the government, to our various stakeholders, and above all, to the people of Singapore, there is no reason why we should not be around. And if we cease to be of use, there is no reason why we should exist.

Sitting down before facts humbly includes listening to what our critics says. There is often a kernel of truth in what may seem to one, at first glance, wrong-headed or misinformed. At the very least, our sternest critics can function as sharp piercing spurs, goading us into action with renewed purpose.

The state of IPS is healthy. We continue to attract promising young researchers — 12 PhDs in the past three years alone. We continue to attract large numbers to our conferences. Our various stakeholders, including funders, continue to find us of use. I am confident we have built a sufficiently strong base to enable our researchers and staff to effect positive change for Singapore and Singaporeans.

 

 

Find out more about IPS 35th Anniversary Conference: Revisitings here.

 

---