Document Code: SG-H-THINK-39 Full Title: Leong Ching — The Behavioural Policy Scientist: From Newsroom to the Frontier of Public Governance and Water Politics Coverage Period: c. 2014–present (academic career; earlier career in journalism from c. 2000) Level Designation: Intellectual Profile Primary Sources Consulted:

Leong Ching and Louis Lebel, "Can Conformity Overcome the Yuck Factor? Explaining the Choice for Recycled Drinking Water," Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 242 (2020), 118196
Leong Ching and Michael Howlett, "Theorizing the Behavioral State: Resolving the Theory-Practice Paradox of Policy Sciences," Public Policy and Administration, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2020), pp. 203–225
Leong Ching, Joost Buurman, and Seow Kiat Tay, "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Negative Spillovers in Water Conservation," Behavioural Public Policy (2024), pp. 1–20
Leong Ching, "Persistently Biased: The Devil Shift in Water Privatization in Jakarta," Review of Policy Research, Vol. 32, No. 5 (2015), pp. 600–621
Leong Ching, "Behavioural Water Policy: Scarce, yet Infinitely Reusable," PLOS Water (2025)
Leong Ching, Research on mRNA vaccine acceptance and behavioural interventions, cited by the World Health Organisation (WHO), 2021–2022
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Faculty Profile: Leong Ching, Associate Professor
NUS Media Release, "New NUS Leadership Appointments," appointment as Acting Dean of LKYSPP from 1 July 2025
NUS Media Release, appointment as Vice Provost (Student Life), 2021
Institute of Water Policy, NUS LKYSPP, research programme and publications, 2017–present
Policy Sciences journal, Associate Editor appointments
International Journal of Water Resources Development, Associate Editor role
Leong Ching, Festival of Ideas profile, NUS LKYSPP
NUS Office of Student Affairs, Annual Reports, 2020–2021
Channel NewsAsia and The Straits Times, biographical references to journalism career

Related Documents:

SG-H-THINK-31 | Joseph Chinyong Liow — Liow succeeded Leong Ching as LKYSPP Dean in October 2025
SG-H-THINK-08 | Terence Ho — Fellow LKYSPP-affiliated governance commentator
SG-D-01 | Housing Policy — Behavioural policy parallels in public goods provision
SG-O-06 | Climate Change Adaptation — Water governance as climate adaptation policy
SG-M-06 | Technocratic Governance — Behavioural insights as an evolution of technocratic method
SG-I-09 | Statutory Boards — PUB and water governance institutional context
SG-O-07 | Digital Governance — Smart meters and digital nudging

Version Date: 2026-04-02

Key Takeaways
Biographical Formation: Journalism to Academia
The Behavioural State: Theoretical Contributions
Water Governance and the Yuck Factor
NEWater and Singapore's Water Story
COVID-19, Vaccine Hesitancy, and Public Trust
Institutional Roles: IWP, Vice Provost, Acting Dean
Assessment: The Behavioural Turn in Singapore Governance

1. Key Takeaways

Leong Ching is one of Singapore's most innovative public policy scholars, whose work sits at the intersection of behavioural science, environmental governance, and institutional theory. Based at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) at NUS, she has pioneered the application of behavioural insights to water policy — a domain of existential importance to Singapore — and has made significant theoretical contributions to understanding how governments can use behavioural science to improve public policy outcomes without resorting to coercion or purely economic incentives.
Her concept of the "behavioural state" — developed in collaboration with Michael Howlett — represents a significant contribution to public administration theory. The argument is that modern states are increasingly operating not merely through regulation, taxation, and service provision but through the strategic design of choice architectures that nudge citizens toward desired behaviours. This framework has particular resonance in Singapore, where the government has long experimented with behavioural interventions (from anti-littering campaigns to CPF default enrolment) without articulating a coherent theoretical framework for such practices.
Her research on recycled drinking water acceptance — the "yuck factor" — has direct relevance to Singapore's existential water security challenge. Through large-scale field experiments, Leong has demonstrated that public resistance to recycled drinking water (including Singapore's NEWater) is driven less by rational risk assessment than by deep-seated emotional aversion, and that social conformity — the knowledge that one's neighbours and peers accept recycled water — is a more effective lever for changing behaviour than information campaigns or economic incentives. This finding has implications for how PUB and the government communicate about water security.
Her career trajectory — from journalist at The Straits Times and Channel NewsAsia to PhD student to associate professor to Vice Provost (Student Life) to Acting Dean of LKYSPP — illustrates the permeability between Singapore's media, academic, and administrative worlds. Her journalism background gives her an unusual sensitivity to how policy is communicated and perceived by the public, a skill that informs both her research on narratives in governance and her institutional leadership.
Her appointment as Acting Dean of LKYSPP (July–October 2025), bridging the gap between Danny Quah's departure and Joseph Chinyong Liow's arrival as the third Dean, placed her at the helm of Singapore's most prominent public policy school during a transitional moment. While the appointment was interim, it signalled LKYSPP's recognition that behavioural policy science — not merely economics or political science — is now central to the school's intellectual identity.
Her editorial roles at Policy Sciences, Water, and the International Journal of Water Resources Development position her as a gatekeeper in the international academic community on water governance and behavioural policy — a form of intellectual influence that extends well beyond Singapore's borders and contributes to the city-state's disproportionate presence in global policy scholarship. These editorial positions also give her visibility into the global frontier of behavioural and environmental policy research, ensuring that her own work — and by extension, LKYSPP's research agenda — remains current with international developments.
Her research on narratives in governance and the "devil shift" — the tendency of policy actors to exaggerate the malevolence of their opponents — provides analytical tools for understanding not only specific policy debates but the broader dynamics of Singapore's political discourse. In a polity where the government has been extraordinarily effective at constructing national narratives (the survival narrative, the meritocracy narrative, the multiracialism narrative), Leong's work on how narratives shape policy acceptance adds a layer of analytical sophistication that goes beyond the usual binary of "state propaganda" versus "genuine public engagement."
Leong's work challenges the implicit assumption in much Singapore governance scholarship that good policy is primarily a matter of getting the technocratic analysis right. Her behavioural research demonstrates that even technically optimal policies can fail if they do not account for the cognitive biases, emotional responses, and social dynamics that shape how citizens actually respond to government action. This represents an important evolution in Singapore's governing philosophy — from pure technocracy to what might be called "behaviourally informed technocracy."

2. Biographical Formation: Journalism to Academia

The Newsroom Years

Leong Ching's career began not in the academy but in Singapore's newsrooms. Before entering academia, she worked as a journalist in both print and broadcast media, serving as an editor at The Straits Times — Singapore's dominant English-language broadsheet — and as a journalist at Channel NewsAsia (CNA), the country's primary English-language television news channel. This career phase — which preceded her academic appointments by several years — shaped her intellectual sensibilities in ways that distinguish her from scholars who have spent their entire careers within the academy. Journalism teaches attention to how ordinary people understand and respond to policy — a perspective that is often absent from the technical policy analysis produced by think tanks and academic departments. Leong's subsequent research on narratives in governance, on how framing effects shape public acceptance of recycled water, and on the gap between expert knowledge and public perception all bear the imprint of her journalistic training.

The transition from journalism to academia was mediated by graduate study at NUS, where Leong earned an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in Public Policy, supplemented by an MA in Journalism from the University of London. This multi-disciplinary formation — philosophy, journalism, public policy — is reflected in her scholarly output, which combines the empirical rigour expected of policy science with a philosophical interest in irrationality, narrative, and the limits of rational choice theory.

Joining LKYSPP

Leong joined LKYSPP as an Assistant Professor in 2015, at a time when the school was expanding its research agenda beyond its traditional strengths in economics and public administration. The behavioural policy science that Leong brought to LKYSPP was part of a broader international trend — the "nudge" revolution inspired by the work of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the establishment of behavioural insights teams in governments from the UK to Australia, and the growing recognition that traditional policy instruments (regulation, taxation, information provision) were insufficient to address complex challenges like climate change, public health, and resource conservation.

Singapore's government had been an early adopter of behavioural approaches in practice — the Central Provident Fund's default enrolment mechanisms, the Housing and Development Board's ethnic integration policy, and PUB's water conservation campaigns all employ behavioural principles — but these practices had developed ad hoc rather than as part of a theoretically coherent strategy. Leong's arrival at LKYSPP helped to provide the theoretical scaffolding for practices that Singapore had been implementing intuitively.

Her academic formation — spanning philosophy, journalism, and public policy — gives her an unusually broad intellectual toolkit. The philosophy training provides the conceptual precision needed to analyse questions of rationality and irrationality; the journalism background provides sensitivity to how ordinary citizens understand and respond to policy; and the public policy doctorate provides the empirical methods needed to test behavioural interventions at scale. This combination is rare in Singapore's academic landscape, where most policy scholars come from economics, political science, or law, and it accounts for the distinctive character of Leong's research programme — empirically rigorous but attentive to the messy, emotional, narrative-driven realities of how citizens actually experience government.

3. The Behavioural State: Theoretical Contributions

Theorising the Behavioural Turn

Leong's most significant theoretical contribution is her concept of the "behavioural state," developed in collaboration with Canadian policy scholar Michael Howlett and published in Public Policy and Administration (2020). The article — "Theorizing the Behavioral State: Resolving the Theory-Practice Paradox of Policy Sciences" — addresses a fundamental disconnect in modern governance: governments around the world are increasingly using behavioural insights to design policy, but policy science lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding this practice.

The traditional tools of policy analysis — cost-benefit analysis, regulatory impact assessment, public choice theory — assume that citizens are rational actors who respond predictably to incentives and information. Behavioural science has demonstrated that this assumption is systematically wrong: citizens are subject to cognitive biases, emotional influences, status quo effects, and social pressures that cause them to deviate from the predictions of rational choice models. The "behavioural state" concept captures the implications of this insight for how we understand government itself: the state is not merely a provider of public goods and a regulator of markets but an architect of choice environments that shape citizen behaviour in ways that may be more consequential than formal regulations.

Implications for Singapore

The behavioural state framework has particular resonance in Singapore, where the government has long been characterised as paternalistic — intervening in citizens' lives through policies that range from compulsory savings (CPF) to restrictions on chewing gum to ethnic quotas in public housing. The standard critique of such paternalism — that it restricts individual autonomy — is complicated by the behavioural insight that "choice" in the absence of deliberate design is not truly free but is shaped by default options, framing effects, and cognitive limitations. The Singapore government's extensive use of defaults, nudges, and choice architectures can be understood not as authoritarian paternalism but as a sophisticated, if not always self-conscious, application of behavioural principles.

Leong's theoretical work provides a vocabulary for understanding this aspect of Singapore governance — a vocabulary that is more analytically precise than either the celebratory framing ("good governance") or the critical framing ("nanny state") that typically dominate public discussion. By grounding Singapore's policy practices in behavioural theory, she offers a framework that can explain why some interventions succeed (CPF default enrolment) and others fail (attempts to promote recycled water acceptance through information alone), and that can guide the design of more effective interventions in the future.

The Devil Shift and Narrative in Governance

Leong's earlier work on water privatisation in Jakarta — "Persistently Biased: The Devil Shift in Water Privatization in Jakarta" (Review of Policy Research, 2015) — introduced another important concept to her analytical repertoire: the "devil shift," borrowed from Advocacy Coalition Framework theory, which describes the tendency of policy actors to exaggerate the malevolence and power of their opponents. In the Jakarta case, opponents of water privatisation persistently attributed worse motives and greater power to private water companies than the evidence warranted, creating a policy discourse characterised by mutual demonisation rather than rational assessment.

The "devil shift" concept has broader application to Singapore's governance discourse. In debates over CPF reform, immigration policy, housing affordability, and media regulation, the tendency of both government supporters and critics to attribute the worst possible motives to their opponents has often produced policy discussions characterised more by mutual suspicion than by evidence-based analysis. Leong's work on narratives in governance — how the stories people tell about policy shape their responses to it — provides tools for understanding and potentially mitigating this dynamic.

Her interest in narratives also connects to a growing body of scholarship on "narrative policy analysis" — the recognition that policy is not merely a matter of designing optimal interventions but of constructing persuasive stories about why those interventions are necessary and legitimate. In Singapore, where the government has been extraordinarily effective at constructing national narratives (the survival story, the meritocracy story, the multiracialism story), Leong's work on how narratives shape policy acceptance adds a layer of analytical sophistication to our understanding of how the Singapore system actually functions.

4. Water Governance and the Yuck Factor

The Central Research Question

Leong's most influential empirical work addresses a question of existential importance to Singapore: why do people resist drinking recycled water, and what can be done about it? Singapore's water security — one of the defining challenges of national survival — depends on the "Four National Taps" strategy: imported water from Malaysia (subject to a bilateral agreement that expires in 2061), local catchment water, desalinated water, and NEWater (high-grade recycled water produced by treating used water through advanced membrane technology and ultraviolet disinfection).

NEWater, introduced in 2003, is scientifically proven to be safe — it exceeds WHO drinking water standards — and it is already used to supplement reservoir water and for industrial purposes. But its expansion as a direct drinking water source depends on public acceptance, and that acceptance has been constrained by what psychologists call the "yuck factor" — an instinctive emotional aversion to the idea of drinking water derived from sewage, regardless of how thoroughly it has been purified.

The Yuck Factor as Governance Challenge

The "yuck factor" — technically known as "disgust sensitivity" in psychological literature — is one of the most powerful and persistent barriers to rational policy acceptance. It is an evolved emotional response: humans have developed deep-seated aversion to consuming anything associated with waste or contamination, regardless of how thoroughly that waste has been processed. This aversion operates below the level of conscious rational assessment — people who fully understand the science of water purification and who intellectually accept that NEWater is safe to drink may still experience visceral reluctance to consume it. The challenge for policymakers is that rational arguments (scientific evidence of safety) and economic arguments (lower water prices) target the conscious, rational mind, while the yuck factor operates at the level of emotion and instinct.

This disconnect between rational knowledge and emotional response is precisely the kind of phenomenon that behavioural science is designed to address. Traditional policy tools — information campaigns, price incentives, regulatory mandates — assume that behaviour is driven by rational calculation. Behavioural science recognises that behaviour is driven by a complex mixture of rational calculation, emotional response, social influence, and cognitive shortcuts. Leong's research applies this insight to the specific challenge of recycled water acceptance.

Conformity vs. Information

Leong's landmark study — "Can Conformity Overcome the Yuck Factor?" published in the Journal of Cleaner Production (2020), co-authored with Louis Lebel — used a large-scale choice experiment to test three potential strategies for increasing acceptance of recycled drinking water: providing scientific information about water safety, offering economic incentives (lower water prices), and leveraging social conformity (telling respondents that their neighbours had already accepted recycled water).

The results were striking: information and economic incentives had limited effect on overcoming the yuck factor, while social conformity was significantly more effective. This finding challenges the "deficit model" of public engagement — the assumption that public resistance to scientifically sound policies is primarily caused by ignorance and can be overcome by better communication. Leong's research suggests that emotional and social factors are more powerful determinants of behaviour than rational assessment, and that policy design should work with these factors rather than against them.

Negative Spillovers

Her more recent work — "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Negative Spillovers in Water Conservation" (Behavioural Public Policy, 2024) — explores an even more counterintuitive phenomenon: that successful conservation interventions can sometimes produce unintended negative effects. The research, using smart water meters to track household consumption, found that some water conservation interventions that successfully reduce consumption in one domain can lead to increased consumption in other domains — a "rebound effect" that partially offsets the conservation gains.

This finding has implications that extend well beyond water policy. If behavioural interventions in one domain produce negative spillovers in others, then the cumulative effect of Singapore's extensive nudge infrastructure may be more complex than policymakers assume. The research introduces a note of caution into the enthusiastic adoption of behavioural interventions, suggesting that the interactions between different nudges, defaults, and incentives need to be studied as a system rather than in isolation.

5. NEWater and Singapore's Water Story

The Four National Taps

To appreciate the significance of Leong's water governance research, it is necessary to understand the centrality of water to Singapore's national narrative. The island nation has no natural aquifers and limited land for water catchment. From its founding as a British settlement, Singapore depended on water imported from the Malay Peninsula — a dependency that became a source of strategic vulnerability after independence in 1965 and that has shaped Singapore's national psyche in ways that are difficult to overstate for outsiders.

The government's response to this vulnerability has been the "Four National Taps" strategy, developed by PUB over several decades: (1) imported water from Johor, Malaysia, under two bilateral agreements (the second of which expires in 2061); (2) local catchment water, collected through an extensive system of reservoirs, including the Marina Barrage that turned the Marina Bay into a freshwater reservoir; (3) NEWater, which is high-grade recycled water produced through microfiltration, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet disinfection; and (4) desalinated water, produced by removing salt from seawater. The government's long-term target is for NEWater and desalinated water to meet up to 85% of Singapore's water demand by 2060 — a target that would effectively eliminate dependence on imported water.

Water as Existential Policy

Water governance in Singapore is not merely a technical domain — it is a matter of national survival and a cornerstone of the country's identity as a self-reliant, resourceful nation. The narrative of Singapore's water vulnerability — dependent on imported water from Malaysia under agreements that have been sources of bilateral tension since independence — has been central to the government's case for technological self-sufficiency and for the massive investments in desalination and water recycling that have made Singapore a global leader in water technology.

Leong's research engages directly with this national narrative. By studying the behavioural barriers to recycled water acceptance, she is addressing one of the practical constraints on Singapore's ability to achieve full water self-sufficiency. If NEWater cannot be scaled up as a direct drinking water source because of public aversion, then Singapore's water security will continue to depend on desalination (which is energy-intensive and expensive) and on the Malaysian water agreement (which is subject to geopolitical risk). The stakes of Leong's research, in other words, are not merely academic — they bear directly on Singapore's strategic vulnerability.

PUB and Behavioural Design

PUB, Singapore's national water agency, has long used public education campaigns to promote water conservation and NEWater acceptance — from the "Every Drop Counts" campaign to the annual Singapore International Water Week to the NEWater Visitor Centre, where schoolchildren and tourists can observe the purification process and drink NEWater from commemorative bottles. Leong's research suggests that these campaigns, while valuable, may be insufficiently attentive to behavioural dynamics. Information-based campaigns assume that public resistance is driven by ignorance; Leong's work demonstrates that it is driven by emotion and social dynamics. This implies that PUB's communication strategy should focus less on explaining the science of water purification and more on creating social environments in which recycled water acceptance is normalised.

The practical implications are significant. If Singapore is to achieve its target of having NEWater and desalinated water meet up to 85% of water demand by 2060 — a target necessitated by the potential non-renewal of the Johor water agreement — then public acceptance of recycled drinking water cannot remain partial or grudging. It must become so thoroughly normalised that the "yuck factor" ceases to be a relevant consideration. Leong's research suggests that this normalisation is achievable but that it requires a different kind of public engagement — one that leverages social proof, community norms, and peer behaviour rather than scientific information and expert authority.

Smart Meters and Conservation Behaviour

Leong's more recent water research has moved from the acceptance of recycled water to the conservation of existing water supplies, using smart water meters to track household consumption in real time. The deployment of smart meters — part of PUB's broader digitalisation strategy — creates unprecedented opportunities for behavioural research: for the first time, researchers can observe how households respond to different conservation messages, social comparisons (showing a household how its water use compares to its neighbours'), and real-time feedback on consumption.

This research connects to the broader "digital governance" agenda that Singapore has pursued through its Smart Nation initiative (see SG-O-07). The combination of digital infrastructure (smart meters, mobile apps, data analytics) with behavioural science (nudges, social comparisons, framing effects) represents a frontier of governance innovation in which Singapore, thanks in part to Leong's research, is a global leader. The integration of behavioural insights with digital infrastructure creates the possibility of what might be called "precision nudging" — interventions that are tailored to individual households based on their actual consumption patterns rather than generic messages directed at the population as a whole.

Singapore as Global Water Governance Laboratory

Leong's water research positions Singapore as a laboratory for global water governance innovation. The island's combination of extreme water scarcity, high state capacity, advanced technology infrastructure, and a compact population creates conditions that are ideal for studying behavioural interventions at scale. The results of Leong's research — on conformity effects, negative spillovers, and smart meter-based conservation — have implications that extend far beyond Singapore to any society grappling with water scarcity, from Cape Town to Chennai to California.

Singapore's hosting of the biennial Singapore International Water Week — the world's largest water technology and governance conference — and the presence of PUB's WaterHub research facility further reinforce this laboratory function. Leong's academic research, embedded within this infrastructure, contributes to Singapore's soft power in the water governance domain — a form of influence that is often overlooked in discussions of the city-state's international standing but that is of growing importance as water scarcity becomes one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century.

The practical question that Leong's work raises — can behavioural science solve the public acceptance problem that is the final barrier to full water self-sufficiency? — is one whose answer will have strategic consequences for Singapore's national security. If the conformity and social norm strategies that Leong's research has identified can be deployed at scale, Singapore may be able to achieve direct potable reuse of NEWater — bypassing the current system of blending NEWater into reservoirs, which serves as a psychological buffer but adds infrastructure cost and delays. This would represent a significant advance in water security, and it would be a direct translation of behavioural science research into national strategic advantage.

6. COVID-19, Vaccine Hesitancy, and Public Trust

From Water to Vaccines

The COVID-19 pandemic provided an unexpected validation of Leong's research programme. Her work on public acceptance of recycled drinking water — which centres on the question of how to overcome instinctive aversion to scientifically validated innovations — proved directly applicable to the challenge of vaccine hesitancy. Like recycled water, mRNA vaccines required the public to accept a novel technology that provoked emotional resistance despite strong scientific evidence of safety and efficacy.

Leong's research on vaccine acceptance, which applied the same behavioural frameworks she had developed for water policy, was cited by the World Health Organisation as an important contribution to understanding and addressing vaccine hesitancy. The parallels between the two domains — recycled water and mRNA vaccines — illuminate a broader pattern: modern governance increasingly requires the public to accept technologies and policies that are counterintuitive or emotionally aversive, and traditional approaches to public communication (information provision, expert authority, economic incentives) are insufficient to secure that acceptance.

The COVID-19 work also demonstrated the versatility of behavioural public policy as a field. Leong's ability to apply frameworks developed in water governance to public health — and to do so rapidly enough to contribute to real-time pandemic response — illustrated the value of building general theoretical capacity rather than narrow domain expertise.

Trust, Authority, and the Limits of Expertise

The pandemic also raised deeper questions about the relationship between expert authority and public trust — questions that Leong's work is well positioned to address. Singapore's initial COVID-19 response was characterised by high public compliance, reflecting the deep reserves of institutional trust that the PAP government has built over decades. But as the pandemic progressed — with shifting guidance on masks, evolving vaccination strategies, and the controversial decision to reopen borders while community transmission remained high — public trust was tested in ways that revealed the limits of the technocratic model.

Leong's research suggests that trust is not a fixed resource but a dynamic relationship that is influenced by how policy is communicated, how uncertainty is acknowledged, and how citizen emotions are managed. The government's initial reluctance to acknowledge uncertainty about COVID-19 — a reluctance consistent with Singapore's traditional governance style, which emphasises decisiveness and competence — may have undermined trust when the inevitable policy reversals occurred. A more behaviourally informed approach to crisis communication — one that acknowledged uncertainty from the outset and prepared citizens for the possibility of changing guidance — might have preserved trust more effectively.

These insights connect to a broader debate about the future of technocratic governance in Singapore. The traditional model — in which expert civil servants design optimal policies and communicate them to a deferential public — is increasingly inadequate for a world in which policy challenges are complex, uncertain, and emotionally charged. Leong's work points toward a more sophisticated model of governance — one that retains the analytical rigour of technocracy but supplements it with behavioural insights, narrative sensitivity, and a more honest engagement with uncertainty.

7. Institutional Roles: IWP, Vice Provost, Acting Dean

Institute of Water Policy

Leong served as Co-Director of the Institute of Water Policy (IWP) at LKYSPP from 2017 to 2019, a role that placed her at the centre of Singapore's academic engagement with global water governance. IWP, established in 2008, serves as a bridge between LKYSPP's policy research capacity and PUB's operational expertise, producing research that is both academically rigorous and practically relevant to Singapore's water strategy.

The IWP role was significant for Leong's career in several respects. First, it gave her direct access to Singapore's water governance establishment — PUB, the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, and the international water technology companies that operate in Singapore's water ecosystem. This access enabled the large-scale field experiments that have characterised her research: studies of recycled water acceptance and smart meter-based conservation interventions require institutional partnerships that a purely academic researcher would find difficult to establish. Second, it connected her to the global water governance community through conferences like Singapore International Water Week and through collaborative research with water agencies in countries facing similar challenges — Australia, Israel, Namibia, and the water-scarce regions of South and Southeast Asia. Third, it positioned her as a scholar whose work had demonstrable policy relevance — a crucial credential in a university system where the Singapore government increasingly demands "translational" research that contributes directly to national priorities.

The IWP co-directorship also illustrates a distinctive feature of Singapore's academic landscape: the close integration of university research with government policy priorities. Unlike academic systems where researchers freely choose their topics based on intellectual curiosity, Singapore's research funding structures and university evaluation criteria strongly incentivise work that aligns with national priorities. Water governance is a clear national priority — it appears in virtually every government strategic plan, from the Sustainable Singapore Blueprint to the Singapore Green Plan 2030 — and Leong's alignment with this priority has been a source of both research opportunity and, potentially, constraint.

Vice Provost (Student Life)

Her appointment as Vice Provost (Student Life) at NUS in 2021 — preceded by a stint as Dean of the Office of Student Affairs from 2020 — represented a significant move into university administration. The Vice Provost role oversees the integration of student life into the NUS curriculum, encompassing residential colleges, student organisations, community engagement, and wellbeing support. It is a role that requires the same understanding of behavioural dynamics that characterises Leong's research: how to design institutional environments that encourage desired behaviours (academic engagement, community participation, mental health-seeking) without resorting to coercion.

The appointment came during a particularly sensitive period for student life at NUS. The university had been dealing with several high-profile incidents related to campus safety, student mental health, and the culture of residential colleges — issues that demanded not merely administrative responses but a deeper understanding of how institutional environments shape student behaviour and wellbeing. Leong's behavioural expertise — her understanding of how choice architectures, social norms, and institutional design influence individual behaviour — was directly relevant to these challenges. Her approach to the Vice Provost role reportedly emphasised the design of supportive environments rather than punitive regulations — an approach consistent with the "libertarian paternalism" that characterises the nudge paradigm.

The Vice Provost role also gave Leong visibility within NUS's senior leadership — the Provost's Office, the President's Office, and the various deans — that would prove important in her subsequent appointment as Acting Dean of LKYSPP. In Singapore's university system, where senior appointments are closely coordinated with the Ministry of Education and the broader government, the ability to navigate institutional politics is as important as scholarly credentials for anyone aspiring to academic leadership.

Acting Dean of LKYSPP

Leong's appointment as Acting Dean of LKYSPP from 1 July 2025 — following Danny Quah's departure after seven years as Dean — placed her at the helm of Southeast Asia's most prominent public policy school during a period of leadership transition. She held the role until Joseph Chinyong Liow assumed the deanship on 15 October 2025 (see SG-H-THINK-31). While the appointment was interim, it signalled that LKYSPP's leadership regarded Leong as a credible candidate for senior academic leadership — and that the school's intellectual centre of gravity was shifting from pure economics toward the broader field of behavioural and institutional policy science.

The LKYSPP Context

Leong's trajectory at LKYSPP mirrors the school's own evolution. Founded in 2004 under Kishore Mahbubani (SG-H-THINK-06), who gave it a global profile through his own public intellectual celebrity, the school was initially characterised by its ambitious positioning as the premier public policy school in Asia — a claim backed by Mahbubani's connections but that required the sustained accumulation of research capacity and scholarly credibility. Under Danny Quah (2018–2025), the school deepened its quantitative and economic research profile, with Quah's own work on the "world's economic centre of gravity" giving the school a distinctive analytical framework.

Leong's presence in this lineage — and Joseph Liow's succession as the third Dean — suggests a further evolution in LKYSPP's identity: from an economics-dominated school toward one that integrates behavioural science, institutional analysis, and regional expertise into a more comprehensive approach to public policy education. This evolution mirrors broader trends in the global public policy education landscape, where the dominance of economics is being challenged by insights from psychology, political science, sociology, and data science.

Comparison with International Peers

Leong's work places her in conversation with international leaders in behavioural public policy, including Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (whose Nudge launched the global behavioural policy movement), David Halpern (founding director of the UK's Behavioural Insights Team), and Shlomo Benartzi (who pioneered the application of behavioural economics to retirement savings). Singapore's own behavioural insights capacity — embedded in agencies like PUB, CPF Board, and the Civil Service College — represents one of the most sophisticated applications of behavioural science in Asia, and Leong's scholarly work provides the intellectual underpinning for this practice.

8. Assessment: The Behavioural Turn in Singapore Governance

The Singapore Model and Global Behavioural Policy

Singapore's extensive use of behavioural interventions — from CPF design to HDB ethnic quotas to COE vehicle ownership mechanisms to water conservation programmes — makes it one of the world's most behaviourally sophisticated governance systems, even if the government has rarely described its practices in behavioural science terminology. Leong's scholarly contribution is to make this implicit behavioural sophistication explicit — to provide the theoretical vocabulary and empirical evidence that allow Singapore's governance practices to be understood, evaluated, and potentially improved through the lens of behavioural science.

This has implications beyond Singapore. As governments worldwide grapple with "wicked problems" — climate change, pandemic preparedness, aging populations, misinformation — the traditional policy toolkit of regulation, taxation, and information provision is proving increasingly inadequate. Behavioural approaches offer a complementary set of tools, and Singapore's extensive experience with such approaches — now being theorised and studied by scholars like Leong — provides a model that other countries are watching with interest. The UK's Behavioural Insights Team, Australia's BETA unit, and similar bodies in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Canada have all drawn on international examples, and Singapore's contribution to this global movement is increasingly recognised.

Contributions

Leong Ching's contributions to Singapore's intellectual landscape operate at two levels. At the empirical level, her research on water governance and vaccine acceptance has produced findings of direct practical relevance to two of Singapore's most pressing policy challenges — water security and public health. Her demonstration that social conformity is a more powerful behavioural lever than information or economic incentives has implications that extend well beyond these specific domains, suggesting a general principle for the design of public communication and policy implementation.

At the theoretical level, her concept of the "behavioural state" provides a framework for understanding an aspect of Singapore governance that has been widely observed but rarely theorised: the government's extensive use of defaults, nudges, and choice architectures to shape citizen behaviour. By grounding these practices in behavioural science theory, Leong offers both a more precise description of how Singapore governs and a more rigorous basis for evaluating the effectiveness and legitimacy of such interventions.

Limitations

The principal limitation of Leong's work, from a governance perspective, is the question of accountability and consent that behavioural interventions raise. If governments are systematically designing choice environments to influence citizen behaviour, who decides what behaviours are "desired"? The nudge paradigm assumes benevolent government — an assumption that is more plausible in Singapore than in many other contexts but that is not without tension in a political system where the line between persuasion and manipulation can be difficult to draw.

Leong's work is largely silent on these normative questions, preferring to focus on the empirical effectiveness of behavioural interventions rather than on their democratic legitimacy. This is a reasonable choice for a policy scientist operating within Singapore's governance framework, but it leaves open the question of whether the behavioural state is an enhancement of technocratic governance or a more subtle form of social control.

Legacy and Significance

A New Generation of Singapore Policy Scholars

Leong Ching represents a new generation of Singapore policy scholars — post-independence, internationally trained, methodologically innovative, and comfortable operating at the boundary between academic research and government practice. Her career trajectory — from journalism to PhD to professorhood to university administration — mirrors the diversification of Singapore's knowledge economy, in which the traditional boundaries between media, academia, and government are increasingly porous.

What distinguishes Leong from earlier generations of Singapore policy scholars is the integration of behavioural science into her analytical toolkit. Older scholars — such as Kishore Mahbubani (geopolitics and diplomacy), Tommy Koh (international law), or Linda Lim (trade economics) — brought disciplinary expertise from fields where rational actor models remain dominant. Leong's work fundamentally challenges the rational actor assumption that underpins much of Singapore's governance philosophy, arguing that effective policy must account for cognitive biases, emotional responses, and social dynamics. This represents not merely a methodological innovation but a philosophical shift — one that has implications for how Singapore's government communicates with its citizens, designs its institutions, and evaluates its own effectiveness.

Her institutional leadership at LKYSPP — however brief the acting deanship — positions her at the centre of debates about the future of public policy education in Asia. As the field evolves from its traditional foundations in economics and public administration toward a more interdisciplinary model that incorporates behavioural science, data analytics, and design thinking, scholars like Leong who can bridge these domains will be increasingly valued. Her work on the behavioural dimensions of public policy marks a genuine intellectual advance in how Singapore's governance is understood, and her dual role as researcher and university administrator ensures that these insights are translated into the training of the next generation of Asian public policy practitioners.

The question that remains is whether Singapore's governance establishment — which has traditionally been most comfortable with quantitative, economics-based policy analysis — will fully embrace the implications of the behavioural turn. Leong's research demonstrates that technically optimal policies can fail if they do not account for how citizens actually think, feel, and behave. This is a message that Singapore's technocratic elite may find uncomfortable, because it suggests that expertise alone is insufficient — that effective governance also requires empathy, narrative skill, and a willingness to engage with the messy, emotional realities of democratic life, even within a political system that is not fully democratic.

SG-H-THINK-39 | Leong Ching — The Behavioural Policy Scientist: From Newsroom to the Frontier of Public Governance and Water Politics

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