Collaborative policy-making processes

This paper is concerned with the application of collaboration engineering to improve the quality of policy-making processes. Policies are needed to guide complex decision-making. The creation of such policies is a collaborative process. The quality of this collaboration has a profound impact on the quality of the resulting policies and the acceptance by its stakeholders. We therefore focus on the use of techniques and methods from the field of collaboration engineering to improve the quality. We present the results of two case studies conducted on the use of collaboration engineering in the context of the policy making processes. This result also involves a generic design of a policy making process in terms of elementary constructs from collaboration engineering, which has been arrived at using the action research approach. Before presenting these case studies, however, some theoretical background on policy-making processes and collaboration engineering is provided.