From insight network to open policy practice: practical experiences

Abstract

Background: Evidence-informed decision-making and better use of scientific information in societal decisions has been an area of development for decades but is still topical. Decision support work can be viewed from the perspective of information collection, synthesis and flow between decision-makers, experts and stakeholders. Open policy practice is a coherent set of methods for such work. It has been developed and utilised mostly in Finnish and European contexts. Methods: An overview of open policy practice is given, and theoretical and practical properties are evaluated based on properties of good policy support. The evaluation is based on information from several assessments and research projects developing and applying open policy practice and the authors' practical experiences. The methods are evaluated against their capability of producing quality of content, applicability and efficiency in policy support as well as how well they support close interaction among participants and understanding of each other's views. Results: The evaluation revealed that methods and online tools work as expected, as demonstrated by the assessments and policy support processes conducted. The approach improves the availability of information and especially of relevant details. Experts are ambivalent about the acceptability of opennessit is an important scientific principle, but it goes against many current research and decision-making practices. However, co-creation and openness are megatrends that are changing science, decision-making and the society at large. Against many experts' fears, open participation has not caused problems in performing high-quality assessments. On the contrary, a key challenge is to motivate and help more experts, decision-makers and citizens to participate and share their views. Many methods within open policy practice have also been widely used in other contexts. Conclusions: Open policy practice proved to be a useful and coherent set of methods. It guided policy processes toward a more collaborative approach, whose purpose was wider understanding rather than winning a debate. There is potential for merging open policy practice with other open science and open decision process tools. Active facilitation, community building and improving the user-friendliness of the tools were identified as key solutions for improving the usability of the method in the future.

Value profiles as tools to understand and guide societal decision making

“…In this work, we developed a framework for describing and analysing decision situations based on the causal chains from actions to impacts and on valuations and priorities of decision makers and stakeholders. The framework borrows from several decision support methods, notably from open policy practice (Tuomisto et al, 2020). A key idea is that the framework should support co-creation of knowledge and openly document the information for further scrutiny by using a web platform.…”

“…We developed a theoretical framework for systematically supporting such use cases. It is based as much as possible on existing frameworks and assessment practices, notably insight networks and open policy practice (Tuomisto et al, 2020). Open policy practice was developed to support health impact assessments as a part of complex decision situations.…”

“…The nodes in such an insight network are described as knowledge crystals (Tuomisto et al, 2020). This means that the topic of a node is described as a question, and the node contains an answer to the question and a rationale (i.e.…”

“…We borrow this causal modelling approach directly from influence diagrams (Pearl, 2005). Open assessment is a version of this approach, emphasising openness and participation and used on health impact assessments (Tuomisto et al, 2020).…”