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Abstract

The current political condition is challenging to policy-making. While social groups subscribe to competing truth claims, institutions for settling disputes lose legitimacy. Post-truth signifies political situations where truth-controversies and destructive emotional expressions are commonplace. There is disagreement on how to address the post-truth problem. While some scholars propose increasing the public's capacity for fact-checking, others focus on repairing the ruptured social fabric. We study how facilitators of collaborative processes in Sweden facilitate communication between actors with competing truth claims. We identify three facilitation strategies: Recognising identities and emotions, Agreeing on facts and Establishing a legitimate process. Based on these findings, we suggest how facilitators and policy-makers can assess if and how a post-truth problem is developing in their practice and how they can tailor facilitation strategies for policy-making that combines the three strategies. The study contributes with ideas for improving policy-making across different world views in times of post-truth politics.

Keywords

Policy-making; post-truth politics; facilitation; process design

Published in

Critical Policy Studies
2025
Publisher: ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR AND FRANCIS LTD

SLU Authors

UKÄ Subject classification

Political Science (Excluding Peace and Conflict Studies)

Publication identifier

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2025.2512358

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/142093