The Roles of Commissions of Inquiry in the Policy Process

In their heyday, Royal Commissions played an important part in the policy-making process. By today, Royal Commissions have declined almost to the point of extinction. Nevertheless, a range of other commissions, committees and inquiries are still established. They have different status and take various forms but, in common with Royal Commissions, seek to broaden the basis of public policy-making beyond government, Parliament and interest groups, through engaging a wider range of participants in a more public arena to generate new ideas, develop consensus or to confer legitimacy upon controversial government policy plans. Commissions are thus important to both policy process and policy outcome.

The existing literature on commissions is limited, and much of it is descriptive, centring on analysis of their political origins, membership and recommendations. It explicitly avoids some other key questions, perhaps because they are not readily answered. There is little real academic evaluation of the purpose or value of commissions and what they might uniquely bring to the policy process and to policy outcomes. This article explores these issues, drawing upon research analysing contemporary experience of a range of commissions, committees and inquiries with a view to offering some generic lessons.