Supporting Decision-Making within the Policy Cycle

Abstract

The policy cycle is a model of interactive stages for structuring policy problems and making decisions to deal with them. The model encourages cycling through discrete activities, using different policy tools. In order to support decision-making within a policy cycle, a decisionaiding perspective is needed; namely formal tools and methods introduced to help decisionmakers develop reasoned decisions during the different phases of the policy-making process.The intention of this chapter is firstly, to introduce existing Decision Analysis analytic methods and tools that can be used to support the different phase of the policy cycle, using concepts from Decision Analysis and Policy Analytics. Secondly, the decision-aiding perspective for the design and evaluation of policies is introduced and discussed. Lastly, the chapter focuses on the importance of the policy design phase, introducing an innovative participatory tool to support policy makers and relevant stakeholders during the design of policy alternatives