Sustainable Policy Making: A Strategic Challenge for Artificial Intelligence

22 AI MAGAZINE Public policy issues cover a wide variety of fields: economy, education, environment, health, social welfare, and national and foreign affairs. They are extremely complex, occur in rapidly changing environments characterized by uncertainty, and involve conflicts among different interests. In the modern world, due to globalization, the political activity and intervention become more widespread, and so the effects of its interventions become more difficult to assess. At the same time it is becoming ever more important to ensure that actions are effectively tackling the real challenges that this increasing complexity entails. Generally speaking, the policy-making process traverses four steps: policy planning, environmental assessment, implementation, and monitoring. The first three steps are performed ex-ante. In the planning step, strategic objectives are set, budget constraints are defined, geophysical constraints are considered. The assessment phase, which is traditionally performed after the planning step, concerns the