Public policy co-creation: dynamics for designing with multiple actors
Designing public policy with those who live it, not just for those who need it
A well-designed co-creation process is not only more legitimate than a technocratic one — it is more robust. Solutions designed with real input from affected actors identify implementation constraints that experts don't see, build commitments that documents don't build, and produce policy people understand because they participated in making it.
What processes is this collection for?
- Participatory design of public policies or programs
- Multi-actor consultations required by funders (IDB, UNDP, EU)
- Public innovation labs designing services
- Co-creation processes in tenders with participatory methodology requirements
Framing and stakeholder mapping
Before convening anyone, three questions: What exactly is the policy problem being solved? Who are all the actors with interest or impact? How do they relate to each other? Framing defines the scope of the process; mapping defines who needs to be in the room and in what role.
Interaction map
The Interaction map is a visual activity that enables participants to identify and analyze key relationships within a system to make informed decisions.
Empathy Map
The Empathy Map helps to better understand people's emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to design more human-centered and effective solutions.
Theory of Change
A participatory framework that maps how a group's activities generate real change. Connects actions, outputs, outcomes, and impact — and makes visible the assumptions that must hold at every link.
Backward Planning
La Planificación retroactiva ayuda a identificar los pasos necesarios para lograr un objetivo trabajando desde el resultado final hacia el presente, promoviendo la estrategia y la claridad grupal.
Diagnostic Walk
The Diagnostic Walk is a participatory activity that uses direct observation of the environment to build a collective diagnosis and propose solutions grounded in local context.
Participatory diagnosis
With actors mapped, the first goal is to build a shared understanding of the situation — not from the technical desk, but from the perspectives of those who live the problem. This phase produces the substantive diagnostic input: voices, qualitative data, and patterns that don't appear in existing reports.
World Café
A structured conversational process where small groups rotate between tables and layer ideas collectively. Surfaces shared intelligence and consensus in groups of 20 to 100+ people.
Focus Group
Qualitative research method: moderated small-group discussion to explore participants' perceptions, attitudes, and lived experiences on a specific topic in depth.
Appreciative inquiry
Appreciative inquiry is an organizational and community change methodology that begins from what is already working well to build the desired future, rather than analyzing problems and deficits.
Stories of change
Stories of change are a participatory tool for capturing and analyzing real experiences that showcase significant transformations and deep learning.
Perception Scale
Engage participants with Perception Scales, a dynamic tool to capture and analyze diverse views, fostering reflection and group insights for actionable outcomes.
Voice of Customer (VoC)
Research method for capturing what customers actually need and experience — in their own words — and translating that insight into concrete product and service improvements.
Multi-actor deliberation
Diagnosis reveals divergent perspectives. Multi-actor deliberation does not seek to eliminate those differences — it seeks to make them visible, understandable between the groups that hold them, and workable. This is the phase where actors with different interests listen to each other under conditions of equity: a necessary condition for any durable agreement.
Open space
Open space (Open Space Technology) is a group self-organization methodology in which participants themselves create the agenda, choose the sessions, and define the topics of work, radically liberating collective intelligence without a pre-established program.
Citizens Assembly
Randomly selected citizens who deliberate on a complex policy question over weeks or months, producing evidence-based recommendations free from organized interests.
Civic Dialogues
Structured conversations between citizens and institutions on specific policy issues, with explicit mechanisms for public input to influence concrete decisions.
Fishbowl discussion
Fishbowl is a participatory dynamic where a small group dialogues in the center while others observe, promoting active listening, multiple perspectives and deep reflection on complex topics.
Future Search Conference
Conference method that brings all system stakeholders together for 2–3 days to build shared understanding and co-create an actionable common future.
Oxford Debate
Two teams argue opposing sides of a motion while the audience votes before and after. Measures each side's persuasion power and builds critical thinking and argumentation skills in any group.
Co-design of solutions
With the diagnosis validated and differences deliberated, the group is ready to generate solutions from multiple perspectives. Co-design is not brainstorming — it is a structured process where each actor contributes their specific knowledge to building proposals that none would have generated alone.
How Might We (HMW)
How Might We is a Design Sprint methodology that transforms pain points into positive, collaborative questions, guiding the team toward creative solutions.
Future scenarios
The Future Scenarios activity allows participants to imagine different development possibilities to anticipate risks, seize opportunities, and generate innovative ideas.
Participatory Scenario Planning
Method for thinking under uncertainty: diverse stakeholders build four plausible futures, then identify strategies robust enough to hold regardless of which scenario unfolds.
Participatory Budgeting
Democratic process where community members vote directly on how to spend part of the public budget — turning citizens into active co-designers of public investment.
Validation and prioritization
Generated proposals need to be evaluated collectively: which are most viable? which generate the most consensus? which hold up to criticism from multiple perspectives? Validation structures that scrutiny. Prioritization turns the diversity of proposals into an actionable agenda with a clear hierarchy.
Nominal Group Technique (NGT)
Participatory technique combining silent idea generation and anonymous voting to produce ranked priority lists free from hierarchical influence and social pressure.
Dot Voting
Dot Voting is a participatory technique that combines analysis and prioritization to identify the most relevant proposals within a collective process, promoting collaboration and group consensus.
Delphi method
The Delphi method is a structured consultation technique that collects and synthesizes the judgment of a group of people through successive rounds of questionnaires and anonymous feedback, progressively converging toward an informed consensus.
Six Thinking Hats
Edward de Bono's parallel thinking method: 6 structured perspectives — facts, emotions, caution, optimism, creativity, and process — for more complete group decisions with less conflict and cognitive bias.
Impact and feasibility scale
The Impact and feasibility scale is a participatory tool for evaluating proposals based on their potential benefit and ease of implementation, promoting strategic and consensus-driven decisions.
Documentation and institutional close
A participatory process without an institutional close produces conversation, not policy. The close connects the process agreements with the formal decisions that institutionalize them, documents the methodology so it is defensible to funders and auditors, and returns results to those who participated.
Technology of Participation (ToP)
ICA facilitation system with three core methods — ORID Focused Conversation, Consensus Workshop, and Action Planning — to move groups from reflection to committed action.
Gallery of results
The Gallery of results is a visual and participatory exhibition that allows achievements and lessons to be shared in a creative and reflective way.
Data-driven decisions
Data-driven decisions is a collaborative activity designed to help teams classify key questions, explore research methods, and balance qualitative and quantitative insights to drive better decision-making.
After Action Review (AAR)
Structured debrief with four questions for learning immediately after any project: what was planned, what happened, why the gap, and what to do differently next time.
Keys to a methodologically defensible co-creation process
1. The participatory methodology is the deliverable, not the packaging
In processes funded by multilateral organizations or tendered with participatory ToR, the methodology is not the path to the product — it is the product. Documenting who participated, how representativeness was ensured, what was done with each contribution, and how actor perspectives influenced decisions is as important as the resulting policy document.
2. Representativeness is not the same as open participation
An open process where anyone can participate is legitimate, but not necessarily representative. If the policy affects groups that historically don't participate — rural communities, vulnerable populations, minorities — you must actively design for their inclusion: accessible dates, multiple modalities, culturally appropriate facilitation. A process where only the already-organized participate reproduces the biases the policy should correct.
3. Separate deliberation from decision
The most common mistake is mixing deliberation spaces (where actors debate and build) with decision spaces (where competent authority decides). Deliberation can and should be broad and inclusive. The final decision belongs to those with institutional mandate to make it. Conflating both spaces creates false expectations and, eventually, distrust when actors perceive that their participation didn't determine the outcome.
4. Document in real time, not afterward
The process memory — who said what, what agreements were reached, what remained pending — degrades quickly after each session. Design documentation as part of facilitation, not as a subsequent task: note-takers in the room, summaries validated by participants before closing, photographic record of collective products.