Abstract:

This article focuses upon the general subject of public dialog concerning the decisional process of educational public policies. More particularly, the article concentrates on the actors, the mechanisms, the legal framework and the current practice in the educational public policy process. This discussion is based on the importance of public dialog in public policy issues as one fundamental stream of an efficient democracy. Nowadays, having access to the new media is no longer a problem of means but one of methods and will to use them.

When talking about public participation in general, in the latest two decades, terms and concepts such as the new public management, the new governance, e-governance and the deliberative movement are no longer new. All these approaches have in common the attention they pay to the ever-increasing role of the public in the decision-making process within the act of governance in general and particularly in adopting public policies. Our focus is on the relationship between the government and their publics and the extent to which communication can play a role in shaping the public support for public policies, especially educational ones. Implementing a mechanism for consulting the public in order to increase the public participation in the decision making process should involve more than the presence of an active civil society – it calls for the simultaneous compliance with more requirements:
1. a real deliberative culture at the level of the decision makers (politicians, experts, etc.);
2. a real deliberative culture at the level of different publics involved in finding solutions for public issues;
3. the use of valid public dialogue models, acquired by the coordinators of the public poll, in order to avoid altering the public consultancy mechanism into public information.

In the authors’ perspective, the democratic societies have reached a certain crisis because, too often, there are no tools and determination for linking the public policies and the publics involved. Such an observation could seem odd, as nowadays public communication has reached quite impressive dimensions and a large part of it is concerned with issues related to government and politicians, but this appears to be a reality.

After investigating the process of policy dialog, as part of the policy process, the authors emphasize the weaknesses of the current situation in Romanian educational system and provide a series of recommendations in order to increase the degree of involvement of the relevant publics in shaping the new educational policies.

Keywords:

policy dialog, higher education, educational policy design, romania.