Policy-Making as Designing: The Added Value of Design Thinking for Public Administration and Public Policy

The articles on which Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are based are available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.

Design approaches to policy-making have gained increasing popularity among policy makers in recent years.

First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this book presents original critical reflections on the value of design approaches and how they relate to the classical idea of public administration as a design science, with a new concluding chapter. Contributors consider the potential, challenges and applications of design approaches and distinguish between three methods currently characterising the discipline: design as optimisation, design as exploration and design as co-creation.

Developing the dialogue around public administration as a design science, this collection explores how a more ‘designerly’ way of thinking can improve public administration and public policy.

Arwin van Buuren is Professor of Public Administration at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Jenny M. Lewis is Professor of Public Policy in the School of Social and Political Sciences and Director of Scholarly and Social Research Impact at The University of Melbourne.

B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of American Government at the University of Pittsburgh, US.