Pushing the Right Policy Levers

Policy Horizons has recently published a very interesting article about policy levers. How can we make our community change efforts more impactful? One way to do this is to be aware of the policy levers and use them to your advantage to create scaled community change.

In the article - Policy Levers of the Future - Policy Horizons identifies 5 policy levers that we all should note: 

• Attraction, Attraction, Attraction: increasing your attraction factor for attention, people and investment will become an important focus in an environment of increased access to communication and information
• Direct communication: intermediary organizations may become an institution of the past as individuals use direct means to communicate their interests and concerns
• Public Servants without borders: this includes an increasing emphasis on the role public servants will play in collaboration, co-creation and co-consumption
• The Values Chain: self organization within values chain organizations may lead to increased interest and a direct role in changes in regulatory matters
• Behaviour by numbers: increasingly organization and governments are mining data (often obtained through electronic interface) to better understand and deliver services to communities - this brings challenges to issues of privacy but is also a challenge for community organizations and collaborative with less sophistication in this area

As I reflect on the content of this paper, I realize that there are both opportunities and challenges for community collaboratives to push these policy levers. We have to increase our capacity to attract, communicate effectively, co-create with non-traditional partners such as government and business, consider the values chain and impact of policy change in our efforts and increasingly track our constituency and how they are changing.

Technology is a critical component of this and investments are required to bring us up to speed with other sectors.

This article provides interesting levers that are available but maybe slightly out of reach. How do we pull them towards us for effective community change. Let me know your thoughts.