This contribution reflects on the experience of being involved in an attempt to collaboratively develop and model proposals for open government. The contributors thoughtfully and carefully set out a range of challenging issues for more collaborative forms of policy design, reflecting on the interests and experiences of different stakeholders from both government and civil society. In doing so, they show how politics and values are central, if often hidden, in policy making. In particular, they show that seeking to make policy differently raises questions of legitimacy, representation, the exercise of authority, how trade-offs between competing interests and values are made, the allocation of risk and accountability and the interplay between different processes and cultures. This contribution demonstrates that failing to recognise these political dynamics risks undermining the legitimacy and viability of new forms of more co-productive policy design.

This contribution draws on an example of open, collaborative policy making which took place over the course of 18 months. Looking back on the process and therefore with the benefit of hindsight, we feel we have learnt a number of lessons about what makes for successful, open and collaborative policy processes. Collaborative policy making can only flourish when it has the political space to do so and this can only be opened, and kept open, by senior politicians. Without ‘senior’ permission to act differently, those within the process are unable to develop the creativity and flexibility required to identify and reach a commonly defined goal.

Politics, in the sense of shifting power balances and individual interests clamouring to be heard, churn just below the surface of any collaborative process.