SPARC helps public administrations, institutions and research partners design, evaluate and improve public policy — grounded in research, collaboration, and a focus on how citizens experience it.
Cutting rules and regulations is often reasonable, but a lighter rulebook is not the same as a lighter experience. An administrative procedure becomes burdensome less because of the rules it holds than because of how people experience it. Real simplification happens in the encounter between citizens and administration, not only in the complexity that has been removed.
SPARC works on this from three sides. As researchers, we study how public policy is experienced; as advisors, we help administrations act on what that research shows; and as facilitators, we bring the two together through collaboration.
We fundamentally believe that simplification rarely needs a sweeping overhaul. More often it needs a spark! The small, well-placed change that lets a heavy system move. That is the idea behind SPARC: Simplifying Public Administration through Research and Collaboration.
We work internationally, across three connected roles:
SPARC is built on four core principles:
We rely on scientific methods and academic standards, so that reform rests on what the evidence shows rather than on what seems obvious.
We believe the insights to achieve simplification usually already exist — in research, in frontline practice, in citizens’ experience. Our work is to bring them together.
We judge a procedure by how it is actually encountered, its clarity, fairness and purpose, rather than by how complex or extensive it is on paper.
Our conclusions answer to the evidence alone. An Academic Council and our Scientific and Ethics Charters keep that independence enforceable, not just stated.
SPARC exists to turn research into simpler, fairer public policies and services, and that work happens with partners.
Public administrations, research institutions, foundations and organisations come to us to take on a question together: to run a project, evaluate a service, build a partnership, or convene the right people around a problem.
If you have a project in mind, or a challenge you suspect we’d find interesting, we’d like to hear from you.
Membership is open to individuals, public bodies, academic institutions and organisations sharing our objectives and values.
By joining SPARC as an individual or institutional member, you:
