STI Policy Process and Its Governance

Policy making is a fundamental function of governments which is the intervention process in order to achieve results and realize the government’s political vision. Accordingly, the study of public policy seeks describing and explaining the governments’ policy making and the way in which it is affected and changed. different frameworks and approaches have been introduced with the aim of explaining and prescribing in the field of public policy. The common point of these approaches is paying attention to the dynamics of actors, the contexts and their impact on policy making from prioritizing an issue in the policy environment to evaluatation and feedback on the policies implemented on that issue. Based on this, the field of science, technology and innovation as one of the most important public problems that directly affects society and its national competitiveness is always influenced by government interventions either directly or indirectly. In the field of science, technology and innovation policy, the concept of governance, due to addressing the roles and interactions of role-makers that lead to policy-making, has always been at the center of the policy-making process for researchers and policymakers. This paper, while analyzing the foundations and concepts of public policy and governance, highlights the implications of these two theoretical areas in the field of science, technology and innovation, and the case study of the ICT sector portrays one of the uses of these topics.