Ms Shi Nan, intern at Het Buitenhuis, graduates from TU Delft
Reflections on 'The World Café' in policy making in Dutch environment
How does the Dutch style of policy making look like?
First of all, as a policy making approach, the World-Café will serve better in Dutch environment if it fits the Dutch specific style of policy making. Thus, the first thing I did in my research was trying to find prevailing Dutch policy making style.
In order to do so, I started from looking at the cultural features in the Netherlands. Since from a foreign student’s perspective, cultural difference is the most striking fact I have observed during my daily contact with this country. Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions are used as a framework to analyze Dutch cultural features. The extreme low power distance and strong feminine characteristics give the Netherlands a simpler government structure and open attitude to values or opinion from lower administrative. While on the other hand, more too often this leads to a long course of discussion and insufficiently power execution. Thus, I defined the Dutch prevailing policy making style to be “loose rational combined with restricted interactive/participative”. At the same time, the World-Café demonstrates a strong characteristic of “interactive/participative” style. Therefore theoretically, Het Buitenhuis has a strong ground to apply this approach in the Netherlands.
Workshop experiments
More findings of the World-Café being applied in the Dutch policy making environment are discovered during the real-life workshop conducted in Het Buitenhuis, with Dutch ministry people and professors from TU Delft. Through interviews and literature study, I found out the problem conceptualization phase of policy making is usually not thoroughly implemented in the major infrastructure projects in the Netherlands.
After discussion with my external supervisor, Yuen Yen Tsai, senior advisor from Het Buitenhuis, we decided to add the problem conceptualization to the traditional World-Café, using some classic policy analysis tools, such as system diagram.
Results
More than half of the participants expressed they willingness to use this version of the World-Café in their future work. And they were really glad to find out that this innovative approach of policy making caught the attention of the Dutch government.
Whereas, the downside of this approach also surfaced: being too unstructured. It depends heavily on experienced facilitator and skillful table hosts to structure the whole process and provide satisfying outcomes. In terms of how to better connect the problem conceptualization part to the original part of the World-Café, the participants are required to be involved in the building up of the conceptualization tools. Besides, the facilitator should draw a streamline beforehand, listing what to expect, what could be the pitfalls and problems, and what can be taken as contingency plan. He or she can even talk to some of the participants to gain a rough idea of the flow of the world-café conversation to be conducted.
One thing worthwhile mentioning is that the Hawthorne effect in such an innovative approach undertaken in policy making could be one of the intentions from Het Buitenhuis. The participants are well aware them being put in a whole new “experiment”, it is likely they are more driven and willing to devote in such a process. This in turn could facilitate the policy making in this country from different directions.
Words of gratitude
To sum up, this research has been a pleasant and extremely fulfilling experience for me. Het Buitenhuis has provided me favorable sources and help along the journey. I would like to express my deep gratitude to my external supervisor and other staff in Het Buitenhuis.
Nawoord
Bijzonder uitdagend om als internationaal master-student, Engineering & Policy Analyses (Technische Bestuurskunde) een kwalitatief onderzoek uit te voeren naar stijlen van beleid-maken, interculturele dimensies en het world-cafe. De afstudeercommissie heeft haar werk beloond met een 7,5! Congratulations, Shi Nan!
Door stagaires te begeleiden houdt Het Buitenhuis voeling met kennisinstellingen. Op deze manier verbinden we nieuwe kennis - van jonge mensen - met praktijkuitdagingen, opdat we meerdere oplossingen vinden voor complexe beleidsvraagstukken.
