ABSTRACT

To appreciate policy dynamics is to look at it from the perspective of ‘objective’ policy analysts: Policy issues are thrown up by the conflicts and tensions of human wants; policy politics dominate contemporary societies, as policy planners face counter-policies of activists and special interests groups; and these politicised wants take place in a world undergoing cataclysmic change, such as deglobalisation, technological change and nativism sentiments. Policy analysis is itself a form of cognitive mapping; policy-makers and their publics cannot be free of their own cognitive filters and prior preferences and bias. Complexity theories highlight the VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – world of politically motivated policy planning and execution. Any discussion on public policy dynamics, from incubation to implementation, uses as its reference a wide range of complexity theorists, primarily Horst W. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, 1 James Horn, 2 and Jeff Conklin, 3 and, in addition, Louis W. Koenig, 4 Euel Elliott and L. Douglas Kiel, 5 Mark Mason, 6 Graham Room, 7 and Reimut Zohlnhofer and Friedbert W. Rub. 8