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12. Participative Policy Making <- Back to categories
Better Policy Making - CMPS Report
In November 2000, the Centre for Management and Policy Studies (CMPS) undertook a survey of senior civil servants in all Ministerial Departments. The purpose of the survey was twofold. Firstly, to obtain a wide range of examples from across Government on new, innovative and professional approaches to policy-making; and secondly to find out from policy-makers what they considered to be the main issues in modernising the policy process, and what support they wanted to facilitate change.
The report is based on the findings to emerge from this survey, and is made up of two parts. The first part pulls together what policy-makers felt to be the main issues in modernising the policy-making process, with their views on the enablers of change. The second part highlights some of the interesting approaches being adopted by individual Departments to progress the modernisation agenda in policy-making.
Better Policy Making: A Guide to Regulatory Impact Assessment
Better Policy Making: A Guide to Regulatory Impact Assessment, by the Cabinet Office provides a how-to guide to undertaking Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIA).
An RIA is a tool which informs policy decisions. It is an assessment of the impact of policy options in terms of the costs, benefits and risks of a proposal. It is not specific to the UK Civil Service – many countries use a similar analysis to assess their proposed regulations and large organisations appraise their investment decisions in similar ways too. The Cabinet Office Regulatory Impact Unit (RIU) website has examples of RIAs and an electronic version of the RIA guidance.
Central and Local, Market and State: Conundrums of Public Service Reform
The UK remains a world leader in public service innovation. Since the 1940s, wave after wave of reform has been applied to the public services. In health, education, social care and transport reform has sought to improve levels of performance within a framework of services which are for the most part free at the point of use, publicly provided or both.
The role of the market has ebbed and flowed (with more flowing than ebbing), the balance between services for which there is national rather than local accountability arising and falling and the steady rise in contractual forms of accountability even within the public sector has been inexorable.
This paper argues that the blanket marketisation of public services may well be under a more sustained challenge than at any time in a generation with the remaining marketisation agenda likely to prove ever more contested and controversial. The post-2001 government reforms may turn back the tide of centralisation which began during the 1940s. However, in the short term these reforms will be tentative, administrative.
Citizens as Partners in Policy Making
Citizens as Partners is an OECD handbook on information, consultation and public participation in policy-making.
This handbook is a practitioner’s guide designed for use by government officials in and offers a practical road map for building robust frameworks for informing, consulting and engaging citizens during policy-making. It recognises the great diversity of country contexts, objectives and measures in strengthening government-citizen relations. As a result, it offers no prescriptions or ready-made solutions. Rather, it seeks to clarify the key issues and decisions faced by government officials when designing and implementing measures to ensure access to information, opportunities for consultation and public participation in policy-making in their respective countries.
Creating Public Value: Analytical Framework for Public Sector Reform
Creating Public Value: Analytical Framework for Public Sector Reform was published by the Strategy Unit of the Cabinet Office by Gavin Kelly and Stephen Muers.
This paper argues that the concept of public value provides a useful way of thinking about the goals and performance of public policy. It provides a yardstick for assessing activities produced or supported by government (including services funded by government but provided by other bodies such as private firms and non-profits, as well as government regulation).
It further argues that public value provides a broader measure than is conventionally used within the new public management literature, covering outcomes, the means used to deliver them as well as trust and legitimacy. It addresses issues such as equity, ethos and accountability. Current public management practice sometimes fails to consider, understand or manage this full range of factors.
Demos Policy Briefing, No. 1 November 2002
This is the first of a series of briefings on innovation in local governance issued by the Demos Project. The audience is local government officers and elected members, citizens and activists, voluntary organisations and policy makers at all levels of governance concerned with the quality of local democracy.
Digital Democracy through Electronic Petitioning
Digital Democracy through Electronic Petitioning is a paper by Ann Macintosh and Anna Malina of the International Teldemocracy Centre, Napier University and Steve Farrell of the Scottish Parliament.
The International Teledemocracy Centre at Napier University has designed an innovative e-democracy toolkit to support participation in the democratic decision-making process. Electronic petitioning is one of the web-based applications in the toolkit. It can be found at http://www.e-petitioner.org.uk/ and has the functionality to create petitions; to view/sign petitions; to add background information, to join discussion forum; and to submit petitions. On 14th March, 2000, the Scottish Parliament agreed to allow groups and individuals to submit petitions using the e-petitioner system for a trial period. The special arrangement between the Teledemocracy Centre and the Scottish Parliament has allowed both parties to start to evaluate the use and civic impact of electronic petitioning in Scotland. The development, deployment and evaluation of e-petitioner have demonstrated how straightforward computing techniques can enhance public participation in the newly established Scottish Parliament. As well as the system being used to submit e-petitions to the Scottish Parliament, it is also hosting the first ever e-petition to the British Prime Minister at No.10 Downing St.
Digital-era Policy Making
Digital-era Policy Making is a paper by a Canadian company, Digital Foresight.
An increasingly complex and uncertain social, political and economic environment is undermining the effectiveness of traditional approaches to policy-making. In the digital economy, translating shared visions of the future into effective policies and real-world outcomes require major shifts in:
Culture: collaborate, engage citizens and share knowledge to create value and build legitimacy
Structure: build multi-stakeholder policy to manage scale, complexity and uncertainty
Process: innovate policy continuously to be responsive to the needs of citizens and the market
At the core of digital-era policy-making is an understanding that citizen-centric processes require active and informed participation by citizens themselves. Innovation in policy-making is driven by the adoption of five imperatives for digital-era policy-making:
Transparency
Participation
Internetworking
Responsiveness
Informed participants
The paper examines several best-practice innovations around the world to help policy-makers understand and engage the emerging model: the policy web. This case also provides 20 digital policy tools that enable policy-makers to bring the five imperatives to fruition.
E-Democracy, E-Government and Public Network
While the art and practice of government policy making, citizen participation, and public work is quite complex, the following points provide a simple framework used in this paper:
- Citizens provide occasional input between elections and pay taxes.
- Power in the Governance infrastructure is centered with political leaders who determine broad policy priorities and distribute resources based on those priorities and existing programs and legal requirements.
- Through government directly, and other publicly funded organizations, Public Work represents the implementation of the policy agenda and law.
Evidence Based Policy and Practice: Cross Sector Lessons from the UK
Evidence Based Policy and Practice: Cross Sector Lessons from the UK seeks to draw out some of the key lessons to have emerged from the experience of trying to ensure that public policy and professional practice are better informed by evidence than has hitherto been the case. It does this by highlighting four requirements for improving evidence use and considering progress to date in relation to each of these.
The paper was produced in 2003 for a Social Policy Research and Evaluation Conference held in Wellington, New Zealand, by Sandra Nutley, Huw Davies and Isabel Walter of the Research Unit for Research Utilisation, Department of Management, University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Getting the Evidence: Using Research in Policy Making
Getting the evidence: Using research in policy making assesses how government departments procure research, against the background of the Office of Science and Technology's programme of rolling reviews. It is based upon an assessment of research activities in three government departments and an international review comparing how five other countries procure research, as well as discussions with other departments and stakeholders.
Released by the Comptroller and Auditor General on 16 April 2003.
Life Satisfaction: The State of Knowledge and Implications for Government
Life Satisfaction: the state of knowledge and implications for government is an analytical paper published by the Strategy Unit of the Cabinet Office.
"There is a large and rapidly growing body of research that investigates what makes people satisfied with their lives. This paper summarises what has been found and suggests how this research may be useful for policy-makers."
Local Government Webcasting Report
Paul Miller of the UK-based sustainable development charity Forum for the Future uses Nike's discomfort over the Jonah Peretti order for a pair of shoes customised with the word ‘sweatshop’, to discuss the threats and opportunities in a wired world to open approaches to policy development.
He explains why internet activism is set to increase and why it should be treated as an opportunity rather than a risk. He argues that instead of raising the barricades, the nature of the internet provides a strong rationale for opening up, engaging with stakeholders and even allowing them to set policy.
Personalisation through Participation
Demos in this 2004 paper, seeks to set out a proposed new script for public services, entitled Personalisation through participation, and in which services are redesigned to maximise the consumer's voice in their design. DEMOS recommends consideration of such approaches for services that are:
- face to face, such as education, non-emergency health care, social services, housing;
- based on long-term relationships between users and producers, rather than a set of transactions, for example the management of a chronic disease;
- depend on a direct engagement between professionals and users where the user can play a significant role in shaping the service.
Professional Policy Making for the 21st Century
The Cabinet Office published Professional Policy Making for the 21st Century in September 1999 as a follow-up to the Modernising Government white paper, published in March of the same year.
The report seeks to provide a descriptive model for and set out good practice in modernised policy making.
Progressive Outlook - Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds
Progressive Outlook - Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds is a paper by Douglas Alexander published in the journal Progressive Politics.
It argues that we should "appreciate the extent to which narratives within contemporary politics help the electorate to make sense of the choices being offered. Put simply, the political parties which were successful understood the emotional as well as the rational dimension to politics, and were correspondingly able to translate their values into a set of policies whose grounding in a narrative made them resonate to the electorate. As a consequence of underestimating the emotional content of politics, too much of our shared conversation in Europe has focused on policy alone."
Public Value Management (PVM): A New Resolution of the Democracy/Efficiency Tradeoff
Public Value Management (PVM): A New Resolution of the Democracy/Efficiency Tradeoff is a draft paper by Gerry Stoker of the Institute for Political and Economic Governance at the University of Manchester.
"The starting point of this paper is that network governance brings with it a new approach to management challenges in the public sector that goes beyond both Traditional Public Administration (TPA) and the New Public Management (NPM). The first half of the paper charts the core features of this new management paradigm in contrast to its predecessors. What emerges is a Public Value Management (PVM) paradigm that presents the achievement of public value as its core objective; the formulation of what constitutes public value can only be achieved through deliberation involving the key stakeholders and actions that depend on mixing in a reflexive manner a range of intervention options. Networks of deliberation and delivery are central features of the approach."
Reforming Our Public Services
The Office of Public Services Reform published Reforming our public services sets out a March 2002 agenda for public sector change;
The report is subtitled Principles into practice and sets out sections covering:
- Laying the foundations for reform
- Putting the customer first
- Standards and accountability
- Devolution and delegation
- Flexibility and incentives
- Expanding choice
- Bringing it all together
System Failure
This report offers a solution to a real mystery in health policy in the UK and elsewhere. Why is that good individual policies, based on strong values and even common sense, often lead to disappointing results? Or worse, they produce unexpected adverse effects, as the NHS case studies in this publication show.
The initial response to this dilemma is to try more command and control, better policy making, tough inspection and more standards. When this doesn’t work the opposite approach is tried. In different parts of the world health care systems are busily copying approaches from other services that are in the process of abandoning them.
The Adaptive State - Strategies for Personalising the Public Realm
The thinktank Demos provides a number of papers on The Adaptive State. Sections include:
- The adaptive state
- Open innovation in public services
- Thinking out of the machine
- Leadership, reform and learning in public services
- Adaptive work
- Creating an education epidemic in schools
- Developing policy as a shared narrative
- Local government: the adaptive tier of governance
- Towards the learning society?
- Public value: the missing ingredient in reform?
- Technology enabling transformation
Transparency in the Networked Economy
Transparency in the Networked Economy describes a vision of transparency as applied to government, as seen by the think-tank Digital4Sight.
The paper identifies the drivers of transparency and its importance to contemporary governance, and sets out the notion of and implications arising out of so-called Transparency Networks.
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