Spanning the boundaries between policy, politics and science to solve wicked problems: policy pilots, deliberation fora and policy labs

Current crises have highlighted the importance of integrating research, politics and practice to work on solutions for complex social problems. In recent years, policy deliberation fora, policy pilots and policy labs have increasingly been deployed to mobilise science to produce solutions, help create popular support and guide implementation of policies addressing major public policy problems. Yet, we know little about how these approaches manage to transcend the boundaries between research, politics and practice. By systematically comparing policy deliberation fora, policy pilots and policy labs, this paper explores their mechanisms of boundary spanning including relationship and trust building, knowledge translation and developing solutions. We situate our analysis in healthcare policy and climate change policy in Germany, two contrasting policy fields that share a perpetual and escalating sense of crisis. Our findings suggest that deliberation fora, policy pilots and policy labs address different dilemmas of policymaking, namely the idea dilemma, the implementation dilemma and the legitimacy dilemma. All three approaches reduce wicked problems to a manageable scale, by grounding them in local decision-making, reducing their scope or reducing the problem analytically. We argue that despite their ambition to modernise democratic practices, unless they are institutionally well embedded, their effects are likely to be small scale, local and temporary. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01187-y.