Devising a Knowledge Management Framework for Integrated Policy-Making in Tehran

Justification for integration of various metropolitan policies is the existence of varied and multiple policy-makers involved in metropolitan planning and policy-making, depicting the complex and insoluble problems of communication of information and knowledge: policy-makers stay uninformed of the aims, agendas, plans and policies of other decision/policy-makers. As a result the generated aims, decisions, policies and plans become disintegrated, contradictory and unreasonably rival and conflicting rather than progressing towards a co-ordinated and participating course of affairs. A vital source of devising any mechanism for achieving integration is knowledge-base and knowledge management. Correspondingly, a major challenge in metropolitan policy-making processes is the lack of accurate, available and integrated information base or a decision support system suitable to enable the integrated policy-making and the adoption of a spatial approach of metropolitan planning. Tehran – as a metropolis – has a multiplicity of decision-makers, policy-makers or participants in its course of change indicating a diverse and incompatible set of aims and policies that retort to the individual, group and institutional inconsistencies which perpetually produces unresolved disintegration. To overcome incoordination and disintegration in Tehran, a changed context of policy-making isindispensable. In the planning and management of Tehran no record of research or policy-making explicitly related either to the knowledge management or to integrated policy-making can be traced and this is an area which this paper has intended to contend with. Thispaperdiscussesthe importance ofshifting the emphasis from traditional urbanplanning to spatial or multi-dimensional metropolitan planning approaches and from using formal information and expertise knowledge toachanged methodological frameworkwithinwhich change extends the traditional to spatial metropolitan planning approach by adopting the urbanknowledge systemsthat arein accordance withthe principlesof knowledge management and knowledge-based policy-making. The purpose extends to tracing the diverse - though related - dimensions and aspects of integration in policy making to devise a conceptual framework to facilitate integration and sharing of knowledge amongst concerned actors accompanied by an integrated policy-making as against sectoral, fragmented and disintegrated policy-making stance. A dual descriptive-analytic and analytic-prescriptive method has been adopted. First, subsequent to the basic descriptions, the level of consistency and sharing of information used in policy-making in Tehran is traced and analyzed. Second, a qualitative content analysis method is adapted to be applied in the analysis of integration from the standpoint of knowledge management in policy-making in Tehran. The analytic-prescriptive path devises a method and a framework to achieve the assumed aims in a way in which if adopted and the appropriate support systems are prepared, the knowledge, information and policy integration in Tehran would be realized. Through establishing such an integrated knowledge base framework for integrated policy-making, broad problems as depletion of resources and duplication of efforts would be overpowered, condensed or curtailed. Linking the dual concepts of knowledge management and integrated policy-making in the planning and policy-making processes of a metropolitan area such as Tehran.