Social Simulation of Polycentric Policy Making : Ex Ante Assessment of Administrative Reform in the Region of Rotterdam

In recent years, the idea that public policy can be viewed as a horizontal and polycentric process (if not a series of interlocked processes) has become widely acknowledged in the field of public administration research. Still to be explored, however, are implications of this view for policy making and policy evaluation. Moreover, work in this field thus far tends to concentrate on ‘network management’ and related approaches that focus almost exclusively on relational aspects of administrative processes. Thus, not individual actors, the problems they face, or the policies they pursue are at the centre of analysis, but the relational patterns to which they belong – and findings highlight the way policy actors interact, rather than how they act. Such analyses may be accurate from a theoretical point of view, but they are unlikely to meet the needs of policy actors. This paper will show that social simulation, used as an instrument for ex ante assessment, may offer guidance – relevant, comprehensible, and doable – for actors involved in policy development and implementation, without trivializing or distorting the theoretical picture of policy as a horizontal, polycentric process that involves many different groups of actors. The paper explores the prospects of social simulation as a method for ex ante assessment of reform in public administration. For illustration, the example of the social simulation of a new town province in the region of Rotterdam is presented. After describing some major problems in this region that had to be solved by large-scale reform of administrative arrangements, we will give an overview of a social simulation that was created for the purpose of making an ex ante assessment of the outcomes of these new arrangements, especially with regard to intermunicipal cooperation. In a final section some results of the simulation are presented. These results support the argument that social simulation is able to contribute to learning effects that may enhance the quality of public administration