Management Capabilities and Policy Capacity: Where are the Links?

This conceptual paper aims to contribute to the discussion of policy capacity in three ways. First, the emergence and growth of ‘governance’ as the mode to achieve public outcomes in this 21st era, requires us to include skills related to collaborative and network management capabilities in the discussion of policy capacity. Second, as more and more public policies are recognized as being complex and wicked, aside from the ability to analyze statistical data sets, policy capacity should also address analysts’ abilities to adopt psychology and decision-making studies to policy analysis. Specifically, this is related to communicative capabilities to frame and brand policies. Lastly, I suggest that we examine the ‘capacity approach’ that has been used in the field of public management and investigate what can be adapted to the idea of policy capacity. In particular, I suggest to differentiate organizational capabilities to ‘produce and utilize data’ from ‘the decision-making process’.