Significant themes Sample Clauses

Significant themes. As with all such participatory events, many comments, questions and recommendations were made throughout the workshop, during both the group exercises and the final panel discussion. Some of these related to issues with which the OPTIC team were already familiar and this served to strengthen our resolve to ensure that the proposed policy packaging framework can be clearly communicated to a range of audiences. However, given the range of viewpoints afforded by the workshop participants‘ diverse professional roles, some of the comments received highlighted issues which the OPTIC team had yet to sufficiently acknowledge. Specifically, the workshop served to illustrate those issues which were deemed particularly significant by key stakeholders, which the remainder of this section shall discuss. System boundaries and critical paths Despite the fact that it only lasted for a short while, the group exercises convincingly demonstrated the complexity of contemporary policy-making. The causal maps generated by the participants developed rapidly from a relatively simple cause and effect relationship between the primary measure and the policy objective, to an intricate web of relationships connecting an extraordinarily wide variety of economic, social and environment variables. Given OPTIC‘s focus on the interrelationships between policy measures and efforts to mitigate the adverse implications of unintended effects, it is clearly encouraging that the issue of complexity in policy-making came to the fore in the workshop. However, while it may be admirable to acknowledge the presence of complexity in contemporary transport policy- making, recognition per se is clearly insufficient as a means of supporting high-quality political decision-making. In other words, whilst it is helpful to understand policy domains as complex phenomena, policy-makers must also be able to manage change in complex policy domains. There is thus a need to strike a balance between recognising and interrogating the complexity of transport problems, and limiting this complexity to a level which decision- making can realistically proceed. On the one hand, too much complexity may lead to data overload and paralysis of decision-making. On the other, an overly-simple model of a policy domain is likely to narrow the scope of relevant knowledge to such a degree that the effectiveness and efficiency of a policy package will be severely undermined. Moreover, as demonstrated in Section 4.3.3, reducing the b...