Our Task?

As City Managers, we understand that any policy-making process involves value conflicts, social constructs, and stakeholders. In our divided societies, where social homogeneity is limited and power is unequally distributed, people have conflicting interests and desired results, and thus will tend to have different particular opinions. Policy-making has to be shaped by the recognition of competing values, ideas and judgments as well as understanding our own bounded rational tools. We try to systematize our decisions and then explain particular judgments about what is “just” by appealing to widely shared principles, we "go back and forth," and finally change the judgments or the principles to satisfy similarly revisable methodological constraints, such as consistency, simplicity, and explanatory power. The real task is to find a stable basis for cooperation that does not abstract from actual interests but that also avoids relativization to those interests.
Policy-makers, management and the policy analyst face uncertainty about the future and the costs of acquiring information in the present. These factors limit the extent to which decision makers can make a fully rational decision. Yet, our rational and political processes are the utmost decision makers can utilize in the bounded and uncertain real world. As managers, as policy-makers, none can predict the end results of our decisions. Nor can anyone identify or recognize all available options in context, even if there were the time and financial resources to pursue them. What policy-makers do have is the insight gained from our experience to accurately identify the values that will come into conflict, deal honestly with social constructs (those of others and of our own making) and to bring in appropriate stakeholders, all the while reserving the right to exercise professional judgment, and be willing to change and adjust in the future.
Policy-makers and policy analysts are going to be required to go beyond the boundary of our current knowledge and understanding to sustain a distribution of burden and benefit across residents in a manner that is consistent with the accepted norms of fairness and equity. Only there will we find many of the answers to the core problems of our communities and organizations.