Participatory policy design: igniting systems change through prototyping

Abstract The complexity of 21st-century socio-ecological-technical challenges increasingly strains the capacity of 20th-century policy design approaches. This new context opens an opportunity to evolve norms and perspectives on what is the intent of policy, but perhaps more importantly, on how policy is constructed – and for whom. In this article, we share an alternative to conventional policy design, expanding the notion of “policy-as-content” to embrace a more participatory approach to frame, make, and implement policy. We briefly present how we combined systems and behavioral design frameworks to scaffold prototyping activities during a design research project that explored food waste as a critical path for co-designing sustainable and equitable food systems in the City of Chicago. We highlight relevant activities of this project to show how our approach can challenge embedded norms and privileges in existing urban food systems and interrogate traditional ownership of problem definition and solution finding in policy design processes. Finally, we conclude with the implications of employing this approach to policy design when promoting large-scale change.