1: Policy Making Challenges

[Identify] the key challenges of policy- makers

Other Information:

Needless to say, the current policy- making process is far from perfect. Dramatic crisis seem to happen too often, and government struggle to anticipate and deal with them, as the financial crisis has shown. Citizens feel a sense of mistrust towards government, as shown by the decrease in voters turnout in the elections. In this section, we analyze and identify the specific challenges of policy- making. The goal is to clearly spell out "what is the problem" that policy- making 2.0 tools can help to solve. The challenges have been identified on desk- based research of "government failure" in a variety of context, and are illustrated by real- life examples. One first overarching challenge is the emergence of a distributed governance model. The traditional division of "market" and "state" no longer fits a reality where public decision and action is effectively carried out by a plurality of actors. Traditionally, the policy cycle is designed as a set of activities belonging to government, from the agenda setting to the delivery and evaluation. However in recent years it has been increasingly recognized that public governance involves a wide range of stakeholders, who are increasingly involved not only in agenda- setting but in designing the policies, adopting them (through the increasing role of self- regulation), implementing them (through collaboration, voluntary action, corporate social responsibility), and evaluating them (such as in the case of civil society as watchdog of government). As Elinor Ostrom put it in her lecture delivered when receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics: "A core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. We need to ask how diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants, and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales". This constatation leads to important implications for the Crossover roadmap: policy- making 2.0 tools are not just tools for government, but for all stakeholders to participate in the policy- making process.

Stakeholder(s):

• Policy- Makers

Objective(s):

1.1: Problem Detection & Understanding

1.2: Citizen Involvement

1.3: Ideas & Alternatives

1.4: Risk Reduction

1.5: Long- Term Thinking

1.6: Behavioural Change

1.7: Crisis Management

1.8: Action

1.9: Transparency

1.10: Impact

Content