LSE BPP Annual Lecture

Professor Ching Leong will deliver the 2026 Annual LSE Behavioural Public Policy Lecture. The title of the lecture is “Not a Drop to Drink: How Behavioural Biases Keep Us from the Water We Need, and How We Can Fix It.”

Water, being both essential to life and yet among the cheapest commodities in modern life, is rich in behavioural biases. We are profligate in use, even as we acknowledge its scarcity; we are hostile to price increases, even when we know the high cost of production, we refused to drink recycled water, even when it has been shown to be safe. Meanwhile, governments under-invest in water infrastructure, sometimes for decades; continue to subsidise water, even for the rich, and drag their feet in repairing pipes, even as water loss hits 50%.

Why?

And how can we ameliorate such biases – in both publics and governments - to better manage dwindling supplies of fresh water, even as demand for clean water rises?

This lecture explores the growing influence of behavioural insights on policy formulation and government responses in the water sector. Its central argument is that water, being essential to life, mysterious in information and a common pools resource, attracts specific biases. Second, such biases, once recognised and understood, can be managed, constrained and even changed by water institutions. Such rules and regulations are therefore foundational to pro-social collective action and organising water behaviours. Last, this lecture uses the water sector to illustrate how Ostrom’s call for “second generation” of decision-making theories can make a useful contribution to the current debate of “i-frame” and “s-frame” within behavioural public policy.

Meet our speaker and chair

Speaker: Professor Ching Leong (National University of Singapore)

Leong Ching is the Vice Provost of the National University of Singapore, and an Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. She is an institutional economist, working on collective action behaviours and the dynamics of institutional change.

Chair: Professor Adam Oliver (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Adam Oliver has helped to develop a whole new field of public policy – behavioural public policy – that focusses on how the findings of behavioural economics specifically, and behavioural science more broadly, can be linked to public policy concerns.

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