۱- Introduction

۲- Designing alternatives for policy making: state of the art

۳- Case studies: The context

۴- Case studies: Formal description

۵- Discussion and conclusions

References

Abstract

The design of alternatives is an essential part of decision making that has been less studied in theory and practice compared to alternatives’ evaluation. This topic is particularly relevant in the context of public policy making, where policy design represents a crucial step of the policy cycle since it determines the quality of the alternative policies being considered. This paper attempts to formalise the decision aiding process in two real interventions dealing with alternatives’ generation for territorial policy making in Italy. The aim of this research is to understand what generates novelty within the alternatives’ design phase of a decision aiding process, i.e. what allows to expand the solution space and discover new alternatives to solve the problem under consideration. It demonstrates ways in which novelty in decision processes can be supported by Operational Research/Multicriteria Decision Aiding tools. The two case studies are used to answer the following questions: (i) Why have new alternatives arose during the policy making process? (ii) How have they been generated? (iii) Which consequences did they lead to? and (iv) What generated novelty in the process? The results highlight two main reasons that can expand the solution space within a decision aiding process: (i) dissatisfaction (of the client, of the analyst or of the relevant stakeholders, especially when dealing with public policies) with respect to the solutions currently proposed to the decision making problem and (ii) opportunity for a change in one of the variables/constraints.

Introduction

In a time when policy makers are tasked with developing innovative solutions for increasingly complex policy problems, the need for intelligent design of policy alternatives has never been greater [50]. Policy makers must avoid simply advocating “stock” solutions unless this is called for by the limited nature of the available time for new designs [69]. The design of alternatives to a decision problem is thus an essential part of the decision aiding process. However, it has been less studied in theory and practice compared to alternatives’ evaluation (e.g. [6]), and this is particularly relevant in the context of public policy-making. From the standpoint of decision analysts, potentially involved in supporting policy making processes, this also represents a challenge. Public policy alternatives are “options for government action comprised of different sets of policy means—that is policy tools and their calibrations—bundled together into packages of measures which are expected by their designers to be capable of attaining specific kinds of policy outcomes” [۵۲] From the point of view of both research and practice ([7], [31], [33], [56]), policy making is a long term public decision making process facing five major complexities: i) the use of public resources and commons; ii) the involvement of multiple stakeholders in a “de facto” participative process; iii) the long time horizon; iv) the requirements of legitimation and accountability; v) the need for the deliberation act of deciding.