The Craft

Welcome to The Craft book project

Public policy and government relations is a growing field – and it is a field that is both complex, rewarding and important. Derided as ”lobbying” by its detractors, the field is actually a complex negotiation of influence over democratic decisions that anyone – companies, organisations, think tanks and individuals – can enter into.

Policy work, when it functions well, means better decisions, better balance of different competing interests and faster social learning around complex issues. When it fails, it is little more than sorry attempts to make backroom deals and buy decisions – and this rarely works.

The great irony here is that anyone working in public policy and government relations who attempts to act as the caricatured lobbyist is likely to be very bad at their job – and also very likely to just fail.

Perhaps because of that caricature, there is little pride in the craft of our profession. This is sad, because the more proficient we are as a profession at what we do, the larger the probability that the better argument wins the day.

If this seems shockingly naive to you, we would just point to that this is not our view, it is Aristotle’s. In his Rhetoric, one of the founding texts for our profession, he writes:

”Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly.”

Aristotle Rhetoric, Book I.

The conclusion seems inevitable: if you believe the world is going in the wrong direction and that the decisions made are bad, well, then you need to get into public policy work. In many ways, this is a citizen’s craft – and the often touted great imbalance between corporate players and civil society has been evened out to some degree by the rise of the Internet, new social media channels and a much more transparent debate.

This brings us to our project – a book that lays out the fundamentals of our profession, approached as a craft that can be taught, improved and learned. We have drawn on our collective experience here, and the aim is not to ”show how it is done”, but to provide insights into what we have learned, the mistakes we have made and the principles we think hold in our field, so that you can learn new things, make different mistakes and challenge those principles.

We are publishing the chapters, here, openly – but ultimately this will also become a book. If you are interested in publishing it let us know, or if you have ideas for subjects or chapters!

Richard Allan & Nicklas Berild Lundblad