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Salzburg Global Fellow Nadia Hafedh reflects on her experience attending the Creative Bureaucracy Festival

In early June, I flew to Berlin with a number of other Fellows from the current cohort of Public Policy New Voices Europe to attend the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, a conference aimed at bringing bureaucrats together to think creatively about how to deliver effective policy solutions to the problems facing our world.

I went into the conference expecting interesting but perhaps limited discussions compared to my own more radical approach to policymaking. Instead, I was met by hundreds of professionals looking to take imaginative and expansive approaches to policymaking that challenge the status quo and proactively tackle the issues we see around us together. It was the openness to learning from one another and working together that really struck me, as we need collaboration and collectivity to truly achieve lasting change wherever we seek to implement it.

Personally, I was inspired to attend the conference and deliver a session because I’ve found from my own experience that much of the current practice around policymaking is often unjust and invisibilizes the marginalized groups who are most acutely affected by the policies at hand. Couple this with the vast under-representation of marginalized communities in the policymaking sphere, and the inevitable outcome you are left with is the repetition of harmful callous practice that does not uplift communities.

As Fellows, we put together a session on “Disrupting Bureaucracy: Equitable and Just Policymaking.” It was a fishbowl conversation where we shared our views on what needed disrupting and how pulling from our varied backgrounds and experiences to really get people thinking about how they can implement principles of equity and justice into their work. Many attendees from our session got involved in the discussion, and their thoughtful contributions brought the conversation forward.

Our only wish was that we could have spent another hour continuing the conversation with all attendees. However, the point is that this work must continue outside the conference, and we hope that everyone takes it back to the spaces they operate in and implements practical solutions to the injustice and inequality we see.

Beyond the conference, everyone working in or around the policymaking sphere needs to make sure they are co-creating policies with those who will be affected by it. There needs to be an acknowledgment that they are the experts in their own struggles, not just academics or theorists or those who have made a name themselves off the back of the communities they have no contact with. We need to check our sources, think about our own positionality, and about who we may be excluding from our current practice and how we can remedy that.

There are always improvements to be made, and we all have a role to play and a duty to be proactive in it.