Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG6: Evidence-Based Public Policy Making Author(s) Mihaela Victorita Carausan National School of Political Studies and Public Administration Bucharest Romania Title Co-creation in Public Policy – An Attempt to Design an Eastern European Model File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Mihaela Victorita Carausan Abstract Public policy needs a shift in the way of approaching people. People-centered approaches take place on two levels: (a) policy making is brought closer to people by engaging people in policy development, implementation and more direct evaluation, and (b) public service delivery is designed around the needs and preferences of people rather than organizational structure of government (UN, 2016). In both cases the emphasis is on understanding people’s needs and striving for people satisfaction. By bringing people to the center of policy-making, governance moves from governing for people to governing with people. Co-creation needs data in order to make a difference. People-centered models turn people into partners, collaborators and co-creators of public services and public policies, but also into users of public information. In the paper we intend to unveil the availability of analytical data and the mechanisms used to monitor the outcomes of policy implementation in Romania and other Eastern European countries. Through the study of the stages in which people can interfere in the public policy we would like to emphasize the right balance between internal focus on efficiency and effectiveness, and external focus on creating value with the support of stakeholders. A place at the public sector table is not so easy to be obtained and especially for the people, but the new technologies should become an enabler of the process. One of the research hypothesis is that ICT may become a powerful tool for engaging people in policy development, monitoring and evaluation. We would like to enable people to participate in the policy implementation, but too often we forget about their interests, and moreover about their willingness to participate and their knowledge, their capacity to share their opinions. Another hypothesis of the study starts from the above mentioned issues and is that people from the Eastern European countries do not have the capacity to act in a co-creation system. The research methods include questionnaires, interviews with civil servants and representatives of the civil society and focus groups developed in Romania and comparative literature study of other Eastern European countries. The study will be built around the main hypothesis that we, the former communist countries, do not know much about the power of the people in the public policy process.
