icegov2012 proceedings

A New Roadmap for Next-Generation Policy-Making
Francesco Mureddu
Tech4i2 Ltd, UK
43B Mill Road, Leicester, UK
francesco.mureddu@tech4i2.com
Gianluca Misuraca
European Commission, JRC IPTS
C/ Inca Garcilaso, 3 - Seville, Spain
gianluca.misuraca@ec.europa.eu
ABSTRACT
In the last thirty years the role of the government has moved
consistently away from services provision to regulation. Society
and economy has become more interconnected, unstable and
unpredictable than ever, and citizens are keener to engage in
complex policy making. Within this context, traditional tools for
policy making, based upon the perfectly rational representative
agent maximizing its own utility in a general equilibrium
framework, have been demonstrated to be unable to predict and
cope with some of today’s most pressing challenges, such as the
financial crisis and climate change. Despite the explosion of data
availability, the possibility to analyse them through
crowdsourcing and large scale collaboration, the advance in
modelling and simulation tools for assessing non-linear impact of
policy options, the full potential offered by the new instruments
for policy making has yet to be achieved. Therefore policy makers
have not yet at their disposal a set of instruments able to cope with
the needs stemming from their decision making activities.
In order to meet those needs the project CROSSOVER “Bridging
Communities for Next Generation Policy-Making” is elaborating
a demand/driven “International Research Roadmap on ICT tools
for Governance and Policy Modelling”, which links the needs and
the activities of policy-making with current and future research
challenges.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
I.6.0 Simulation and Modeling - General
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Performance, Economics
Keywords
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
62
David Osimo
Tech4i2 Ltd, UK
43B Mill Road, Leicester, UK
david.osimo@tech4i2.com
Stefano Armenia
Sapienza University of Rome CATTID
P.le Aldo Moro, 5 - 00185 Rome, Italy
armenia@cattid.uniroma1.it
Governance Analysis and Evaluation, Policy Making 2.0,
Modelling and Simulation, System Dynamics, ICT Tools,
Stakeholders’ Engagement
INTRODUCTION
The role of the government in the last century has not decreased
as the common wisdom would suggest. In fact it has increased
until the end of the ‘70s, and remained stable for the following 30
years. However, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system
together with its associated Keynesian policies marked the switch
from a service provision role of the government towards a
regulatory one, often in novel areas such as environment,
telecommunications and technology [20]. As we will see, as
governments are much more involved in “steering” than in
“rowing”, today more than ever the role of the policy maker has
become difficult due to new challenges. Nowadays, society and
economy are more interconnected, unstable and unpredictable
than they have ever been. As pointed out by [25], we live in the
age of “Extremistan”, a world of “tipping points” [23], “cascades”
and “power laws” [4], where extreme events are “the new normal”
[12].
The policy issues of our age can be addressed only through the
collaboration of all the components of the society, including the
private sector and individual citizens [11]. In fact only changes in
the daily behaviour of citizens can help to tackle challenges such
as climate change, consumable resources and sustainability of the
health system. As clarified by the UK Prime Minister, David
Cameron, "the success of the Big Society will depend on the daily
decisions of millions of people" 1 .
In addition citizens are more than ever willing to engage in
complex policy decision making according to the emergence of
the "Gov 2.0 paradigm" offering new opportunities to enter into
data production, analysis and decision-making. On the other hand
this participation is often fruitless as it is limited to conversations
on social networks, blogs and twitter and a real impact has been
achieved only in specific, highly advertised cases that led to a
massive mobilisation. Moreover the participation seems to be
limited to individuals highly interested and motivated in policy
issues. Finally, seldom the human nature is able to take into
account the long-term impact of our choices, as short-term
impacts are more predictable and visible [16]. However, in an
1 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12443396