Policy-making and Safety Management Processes
Objectives
Work Package 1, “Policy” is designed to fill in a blank in knowledge on road safety policy making processes, their institutional framework and the data, methods and technical tools needed to base policy formulation and adoption on scientifically-established evidence.
WP1 focuses on the actions, practices and relationships at the national level of field actors including decision-makers, policy-makers, professionals involved in the implementation of road safety programmes or measures, researchers and experts and other stakeholders from the public and the private sectors representing all areas of interests in road safety.
The detailed objectives of the Work Package determine the fiver tasks to be performed:
- Identifying policy-makers’ needs in terms of data, data analysis and methodological tools,
- consulting the major stakeholders on these issues
- Defining a methodology for the investigation of road safety management and policy-making processes
- Gathering and making available qualitative and quantitative information on road safety management and policy-making in a representative sample of European countries
- Proving a global analysis of the road safety policy making scene in Europe with reference to “good practice” in road safety management and evidence-based road safety programmes.
WP1 is a central activity in DaCoTA as it is designed to feed the information obtained from decision-makers and stakeholders in European countries to two other work packages (“Decision Support” and Data Warehouse”) in order to anchor the development of ERSO into real facts about policy-making..The data collection structure developed in the investigation methodology should also pre-figure the future area of ERSO on road safety management.
The five tasks of WP1
Task 1.1: Assessment of policy-makers’ needs for data and technical tools
The assessment of policy-makers’ needs is a joint task of two Work Packages (“Policy” and “Decision Support”) and is also crucial to the work in “Data Warehouse” as it provides priorities for data treatment and the development of appropriate tools which will be performed within DaCoTA.
In order to get results at an early stage of the project, the assessment is based on the consultation of a panel of experts representing European countries and Israel. The experts invited to participate include the members of the CARE/RSPI network of the European Commission as well as personalities of the policy-making and research areas selected by the members of the DaCoTA team. The consultation process is two-fold:
- An e-mail open questionnaire in which experts are requested to answer and elaborate on their needs for data and methodologies around a matrix of tasks which have to be performed in knowledge-based policy-making
- A series of interviews performed by the members of the DaCoTA WP1 team in their own countries and a few more.
The information gathered through the two processes is analysed and compared and a synthetic report is provided.
Task 1.2: Development of an investigation methodology to assess road safety management
The road safety management framework is one of the less documented elements of national road safety policies in Europe. However, it is assumed that road safety management systems which determine policy formulation, adoption and implementation conditions play a key part in the development of knowledge-based policies and the success of road safety action. The investigation of road safety management systems in Europe and Israel should fill in a gap of knowledge and allow for international comparisons.
Based on previous findings from collective expertise exercises and from researchers’ experience, road safety management is described as a set of institutional structures, management processes and tasks; criteria or indicators of “good practice” are proposed for each of them. A detailed questionnaire is developed to describe structures, processes and tasks and document “good practice”, including closed questions and opportunities to elaborate freely on the key issues.
The questionnaire is to be filled in by European personalities and experts involved in, or associated to, road safety policy-making. Although the questionnaire is to be precisely formulated, it is felt that DaCoTA team members have to be available to provide information to the persons consulted and ensure that questionnaires are returned. The choice of countries to investigate has to take into account this constraint as well as criteria of representativeness (geographic location, size of country, recent road safety performances, etc.).
A detailed report on the construction of the methodology, the final product and how to use it for data collection is to be delivered.
Task 1.3: Stakeholders’ consultation
Road safety action impacts individual and social lives of citizens so that very different stakeholders are concerned by the action although not all of them are directly associated to policy formulation and adoption. It is now current practice in European countries to involve the stakeholders at various stages of the policy-making process, which makes it necessary to understand what their needs for information, data and methodologies may be, and ultimately to provide for these needs.
Based on the findings of Task 1.1 on the needs expressed by experts and policy-makers, a closed questionnaire is developed by the DaCoTA WP1 team members. The questionnaire is posted online and is to be filled in online by stakeholders from all European countries who are personally contacted by mail and asked to participate. An extensive list of stakeholders from the private and the public which has been compiled by the European Commission is available to the DaCoTA team for the purpose.
A report will summarize the findings of the stakeholders’ consultation and compare them to the assessment of needs obtained from the panel of experts in Task 1.1.
Task 1.4: Information gathering
Following finalization of the questionnaires for data collection, this task fulfils two main goals:
- monitoring the information process and controlling quality of the incoming data,
- preparing a simple electronic facility to store and analyse both the quantitative and qualitative information collected, and hand over the methodology and results for future use in the development of ERSO.
Task 1.4 is a key component of the Work Package as it ensures completeness and validity of the information gathered, and thus of the analysis to follow, and it lays the ground for a future extension of the investigation to a larger number of countries and other foreseeable developments.
Task 1.5: Information analysis
An in-depth analysis of the information collected in tasks 1.3 and 1.4 is carried out, including a quantitative analysis of the answers to the closed questionnaire and a qualitative analysis of the descriptions and comments added by the personalities requested to participate. Specific multifactorial data analysis and classification methods may be used.
Comparisons between results obtained from experts, policy-makers and other stakeholders may be further performed in order to highlight major differences (if any).
The final report will encompass all findings from the information collected and analyzed in the Work Package.
The partners
The partners involved are CTL, Italy, IBSR, Belgium, INRETS (now IFSTTAR), France, ITS, Poland, KfV, Austria, NTUA, Greece, SWOV, the Netherlands, Technion (Israel), VSRC (U.K.).
The Work Package is headed by INRETS, Task 1.1 by IBSR and INRETS, Task 1.2 by INRETS, Task 1.3 by KfV, Task 1.4 by VSRC and Task 1.5 by NTUA.