The World-Café

Abstract

In recent years, the occasional ineffectiveness in policy analysis to support policy making in major infrastructure projects in the Netherlands has caught our attention in exploring the latent causes and proper tools to facilitate policy making in the Netherlands. Our client, Het Buitenhuis in the Netherlands, has been engaged in facilitating policy makers in the Netherlands with untraditional ways to create policy, which they call “out of box thinking”. Given the need of an appropriate policy making approach in the Netherlands, it seems worthwhile to study its value in some particular cases. To be specific, we introduce a new method, “the world-café”, as a potential innovative and to our client very promising policy making approach. Therefore, main research question is: Is the world-café approach a suitable alternative to facilitate policy making in the Netherlands, given the style of policy making embedded in the Netherlands? In order to answer this main research question, we delineate it into two sub-research questions in this research: The first step is to study what kind of impact is there from the cultural and non-cultural factors on the Dutch way of policy making, and whether the world-café fits the Dutch policy making context in theory. In this step, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are applied to find the relations with the Hexagon model to define the features of the Dutch culture, which will enhance our understanding in this country’s unique behavior when it comes to policy making. Meanwhile, previous research on Dutch perspective on policy analysis is studied to understand this country’ style of policy making. As a result we generate the prevailing policy making style in the Netherlands, namely loose rational + restricted participatory/interactive. Besides, given the features of the world-café, we conclude that it embraces the similar style as the style of policy making in the Netherlands, which leads us to the assumption that this new approach should enhance policy making in Dutch environment, which is tested in the next step with further experiments. The second step is therefore to answer the question whether the world-café a promising approach in the Netherlands after testing it also in practice: conducting the world-café workshop as in Het Buitenshuis version in Dutch policy making context? Or should there be any adjustments? In this step, two rounds of the world-café experiments are conducted with Dutch Ministry people and Het Buitenhuis staff. The Betuweroute is used as case study in the experiment. At the same time, we also define the German style of policy making with sources available as this helps to explain why things at the border of the Netherlands and Germany did not seem to match in Betuweroute case. Experience and suggestion are required from the participants on how well the world-café works to solve problems according to the tools they normally use and whether there is space to improve the Het Buitenhuis version of the world-café with problem conceptualization as a start. The secondary aim that this experiment serves is to make the conflicts between German and Dutch policy making explicit for measures to take in solving them. Thus we also test the performance of this method in offering benefits for cooperation in such major infrastructure projects. Conclusions are given on how this world-café method can be modified to facilitate policy making in the Netherlands. Suggestions are made for future projects, on how it can be applied and what resistance might occur etc.