DECIDO’s mission is to demonstrate the groundbreaking impact of the adoption of innovative methodologies, tools and data enabling the effective development of better evidence-based policies by public authorities. The needs and challenges encountered by public administrations in their everyday activities had to be documented and analysed in order to fully comprehend them and allow the DECIDO team to offer solid proposals with the goal to reengineer their policy making approach, based also on previous successful practices and roadmaps in different policy making settings.
DECIDO attempts to fulfill its mission by building upon: i) the insights of carefully selected previous projects, namely BigPolicyCanvas and SONNETS; ii) extensive desk research, following a structured tailored process, ending up in reviewing more than 100 documents, tasks that were completed during the first period of the project’s activity.
More importantly though, following the projects’ analysis and literature review, 22 interviews were conducted with experts experienced in diverse fields of the public sector, that enabled the identification of a final list of 34 needs and 7 challenges. The aim of the interviews was to acquire a very good picture of the needs and challenges of the public authorities in Europe, as the interviewees included experienced public administration representatives of the consortium members’ countries, as well as experts important for the application of DECIDO’s pilot scenarios. To that end, 8 horizontal and 14 pilot-specific interviews were conducted.
Additionally, the range of interviews conducted enabled the identification of relations and similarities among the identified needs and challenges, and the results will be cross-analysed and mapped to i) uncover similarities that can later help replicate successful practices and roadmaps in different policy making settings and ii) serve as input to examine the possibility of replicating practices and procedures in different policy making settings.