DailyPost 1204
PUBLIC POLICY
Public policy is the right synthesis of the needs on the ground, the aspirations of the people and the vision of the leadership in the current world context, in a framework which is doable and has inherent possibility of implementation and delivery. In the Public Policy ecosystem what is conspicuously missing is the main stakeholder, that is the community or group to which the policy is being addressed to. He at the best is either represented by some numbers or by professional lobbyist of whatever variant.
The self styled stakeholders the Public Policy Schools, the Think Tanks and the governmental mechanism which gets into this act are not connected to each other. They were not intended to be. They have created these institutions for research and creating documents as per there requirements based on the curriculum and the other pre-requisites laid down. It has never been the thinking that it would be consumed by the agency which actually formulates the public policy in that particular field.
More than being an input to the Public Policy mechanism it is more of a critique to whatever has been the shortcoming in that regard, end to end, from facts and figures, documentation, nature and structure of the document, the policy direction and the issues which has come in way of implementation. As usual the whole blame beginning to end is on the machinery which is mandated to do this task and has gone with doing it.
With the roles of these ancillaries not clear in the scheme of things, there seems to be a turf war, to gain control and remain in possession of it. Each claim expertise over each other and that their document created is revolutionary. To make a paradigm shift all organisations who are of some quality, expertise and experience beyond just writing documents should be encouraged to feed into the Public Police input pipeline. It would certainly do justice to the worthiness of the final output.
PUBLIC POLICY SHOULD BE THE AMALGAMATION OF ALL QUALITY INPUT AVAILABLE & PROFESSIONAL PROCESSING OF IT.