Method and Tools to Support Stakeholder Engagement in Policy Development: The OCOPOMO Project

Good governance and open government principles require more participative, open, transparent, accountable, and collaborative. However, in public policy development, the negligence of these principles loomed particularly large until recently. In consequence, citizens have taken action by forming protest activities or responding to current politics with election turnouts leading to drastic change in political directions. Lessons from such activities are that policy makers need urgently to respond to demands of citizens to engage more proactively with politics in policy decisions that heavily concern particular stakeholder groups and citizens. Both groups need reliable support and up-to-date information and efficient and effective interactions on emerging societal problems and public affairs. The authors introduce an innovative approach to collaborative policy development, integrating scenario development, and formal policy modelling via an ICT toolbox. To bridge the gap between narrative texts of stakeholder- generated scenarios and formal policy models generating model-based scenarios, introducing conceptual modelling, which supports the construction of conceptual models of the policy domain and which enables tracing inputs of stakeholders to inform the formal policy models. This way, policy makers and stakeholders are better supported to understand the policy context. The OCOPOMO (Open Collaboration in Policy Modelling) approach fully supports the implementation of good governance principles.