[governance] ECTF (was Re: Aspen)

[Norbert Bollow]

Parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 July 2012 01:58 PM, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> >> So I think that what is needed is to provide *every* government
> >> with good, well-balanced information, that is appropriate as an
> >> input to the national policy development processes. (That by the
> >> way is the goal of the ECTF proposal.) Greetings, Norbert 
> 
> I have been trying to take time out to comment on your ECTF process, 
> with which I indeed have many issues, but I would present them at
> some later point of time. Now, just that I was intrigued to read that
> the ECTF proposal was meant as an 'input providing process' for
> policy making and as a not policy making process per se. If this is
> true, it would greatly change my perspective on the ECTF proposal.

I can assure you that ECTF is definitely meant as an /input providing
process for policy making/, and that there is no intention to give ECTF
authority to make actual policy decisions. If this is not clear enough
from the draft text that I have put up, I will be very eager to
clarify that. In fact your reaction tells me that this is probably not
clear enough, so I will revise the draft text ASAP to make this aspect
clearer.

The structures and procedures that I'm proposing for ECTF are definitely
not suitable for the task of making decisions about which balance to
choose between conflicting legitimate interests, a task which is a key
part of just about every policy making process. However I don't think
that ECTF needs to provide a solution for this problem since we already
have governments and they are designed to solve this problem. If they
don't solve it well, the bugs are either in the area of information
gathering (ECTF is intended to improve the information input of the
decision making process. This is important because if the information
input is one-sided or rubbish in some other way, the resulting policy
decisions will probably be badly unbalanced no matter how good and
democratic the decision making process may be.) or in the area of the
actual decision making process (Any bugs in that area will need to be
addressed in the specific context of the particular political system.).

What ECTF is designed to be able to do is to collect, by means of a
balanced multistakeholder process, information about needs, concerns,
cause-effect relationships, and available evidence, and to process
all this to the extent possible into recommendations. At the very least
it should be possible to reach rough consensus on recommendations of the
form "Public policy regarding topic X should take into consideration
the following needs and concerns... ." Ideally (but with greater
difficulty of reaching rough consensus) specific proposals for laws
and others kinds of public policy decisions could be developed in a
form that explicitly suggests a choice of options for possible
choices of the balance between conflicting legitimate interests,
together with information on what is known about the advantages and
disadvantages (from the public interest perspective) of the different
options.

Greetings,
Norbert

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