- Dr. Michael Sherraden, Benjamin E Youngdahl Professor of Social Development, and Director of the Centre for Social Development, Washington University, USA
Dr. Sherraden looked at how to make NYS a major policy. NYS is a `strong policy' in that it has multiple, major positive impacts. However, major policy innovation presents both practical and intellectual challenges, and both types of challenges must be met for long-term success. Many of the practical challenges regarding NYS have already been overcome: in short, there is considerable experience about how to do it. Also, there is generally good public support and a stable, bipartisan and consistent political consensus in support of NYS. However, intellectual challenges are lagging behind - there is a need to build a strong foundation of knowledge, an empirical base which convincingly shows the multiple, major positive impacts of NYS, and paves the way for it to become a major policy. This crucial knowledge base is currently lacking, and is lagging behind public sentiment and political support.
Maturation (widespread adoption and institutionalization) of a policy innovation usually, in the absence of a crisis such as war or economic depression, takes decades. It is an incremental process which requires us to be patient and practical and to think long-term. An essential part of this long-term thinking is to build a knowledge foundation.
The practical knowledge about how to do it comes from the lessons we have learnt from previous and existing schemes, for example in the USA - the Civilian Conservation Corps, the GI Bill for Education, the Peace Corps, VISTA, numerous state and local conservation and service corps, and Americorps. Lessons have included: the government is able to organize large and effective service programmes; this type of service has value, for example, in whetting the appetite for further education; young people can be trusted to do important work elsewhere than in the armed forces and; young people can serve effectively in a range of settings, at home as well as overseas.
However, we have not provided a convincing enough body of evidence to support the concept of NYS and sustain it through the likely long and arduous political process on its way to becoming a major policy. Although William James's idea, in his famous essay `The Moral Equivalent of War' (1910), was a poetic and appealing one ie that NYS was a way of re-channelling the war drive, we really need a stronger, richer theory of NYS that can capture the public's imagination, serve as a framework for understanding empirical evidence, and guide policy innovation.
Applied social sciences tends to structure its inquiry in terms of problem- or success-oriented theories; Dr. Sherraden suggests that the most powerful and productive theoretical logic for the applied social sciences, and for building a theory of NYS is that of `the complex impact of success' - a model which looks for and examines the multiple, positive impacts of NYS.
In building the knowledge base for NYS it is important to pay attention to several questions:
(i) What is NYS? - a simple, useful definition would be `a period of service to community, society or world', and this service should be institutionalized as part of an opportunity structure for young people, should be at minimal financial compensation, and should be recognized and honoured by society and the state;
(ii) What is occurring in NYS? - we still have some work to do to find out what is going on in NYS before we can specify theory that can be tested. There is a lot to be said for good case studies, looking for patterns that might inform theory-building;
(iii) What are the multiple effects of NYS? - as Donald Eberly has pointed out, the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of NYS is its multi-dimensional nature, with different exponents viewing NYS as having different purposes. In The Moral Equivalent of War? A Study of Non-military Service in Nine Nations (Sherraden, Sherraden, and Eberly, 1990) systems of non-military service are compared across eleven outcomes in five categories: Peace (moral equivalent of war, international understanding); Commonweal (cultural integration, citizenship); State Interests (incorporation and control, support for the military); Benefits to Participants (personal development, education and training, employment opportunities); Productivity (social development, economic development). The findings in this study (that `commonweal' and `productivity' rank highest, `peace' and `state interests' lowest, and `benefits to participants rank in the middle) are simple ordinal ratings of emphasis and outcome, based on documentary information and field work - we are a long way from integrating this thinking into something that could be called a theory, and a long way from assigning dollar values to the outcomes, although these should be long term goals of research. However, there are some examples of good research that reaches greater empirical specificity - studies of state and local youth corps in the USA find positive impacts on employment, earnings, personal and social responsibility, voting and education.
A note of caution: despite the knowledge that NYS has multiple positive impacts, NYS programmes will not always be `all things to all people', and much of what is positive will be secondary effects (not conscious targets). It may be more desirable for programmes to focus on a small number of defined objectives and to try to do these well (as proved successful for the Civilian Conservation Corps in the USA with its two major goals: economic support for enrollees and enrollees' families, and accomplishment of conservation work).
It is worth reiterating that NYS is among a small and select class of concepts that are ideally suited for public policy, because it is (i) simple and clear; (ii) we already know how to do it; and (iii) the impacts are likely to be multiple and positive. Each of these three points should be made clear to the public and policymakers again and again.
4th
Global conference on national youth service (1998) 
