Intelligence in Public Policy

Abstract

This section of the book is especially based on the latest literature on public policy analysis. It discusses broadly the current challenges in organising and running public policies and health policy in particular. We argue that there is a lot of talk about complexity in society, but there is eventually little evidence on what actually constitutes this complexity and how public policies deal with the complexity domain. Moreover, it seems that the problem of existing policy-planning mechanisms and public policy-evaluation paradigms is that they do not fit in with, in particular, the current societal challenges and nexus problems (embedded and constructed somewhere in between existing policy areas). This, in turn, means that there is an urgent need to constitute new kinds of evaluation systems incorporated with the idea of intelligent public policy making. This calls for new methods and methodologies, new institutional settings for evaluation systems and new accountability understanding. This part of the book deals with what the promotion of intelligence presupposes from the perspectives of public policy, decision-making, implementation and evaluation. The starting point in our reasoning is especially knowledge management and decision-making procedures at the level of health policy. In this chapter, we discuss issues like forecasting and the urgent need to develop specific ex ante evaluation methods and procedures, and it underlines putting an emphasis on forecasting societal and health policy-related problems instead of ex post trials. As a result, we argue that a new governance model is evolving within the complexity framework: the New Public Integration. Moreover, this chapter analyses the emergence of new information bases for health policy and the role of big data and the Internet of (Intelligent) Things in particular.