About — CRITICAL POLICY LAB

According to the UN, millions of humans as well as our planet with its ecosystem and animals will be affected if we continue to embrace the “business as unusual” operandus and approaches. Given the intricate nature of these challenges, we need a truly inclusive and systemic approach to tackling the root causes as well as the systems and structures that further perpetuate existing inequalities or further harm ecosystems.
With such complexity at play, affecting the lives of many, it is essential that current and future policymaking and social change approaches are well-encompassing. Yet, it is our belief that many of the prevailing approaches and tools are rooted in institutions, systems, and ideas that are profoundly outdated, biased, and unjust.
There is thus a strong need both on local and global levels to redefine how we govern, live together, and move forward while respecting our planetary boundaries.
In order to achieve this, we aim to cultivate a global movement for collective re-imagination and critical practices in policy-making and social change. We are committed to breaking down traditional barriers, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, decolonizing policy, and amplifying marginalized voices in order to create a more just and equitable society.
In this way, we believe that we can ensure that policymaking becomes a vehicle for social justice, transcending boundaries and being steered by diverse communities.
The Critical Policy believes that all lives are governed by policies and social change initiatives. Therefore, we serve a wide audience.
Through community engagement, advocacy and policymaking, and activation and learning - especially grounded in interdisciplinary dialogue - we work together with various participants and stakeholders to reconstruct policy into a force for positive transformation, pluriversality, equity, and political imagination.
Everything we do, we are guided by the following principles:
1. EXPERIMENTATION | We aim to create an environment to experiment with different approaches and modalities in order to facilitate genuine innovation. This is mainly driven by taking an interdisciplinary and cross-boundary approach among and across various individuals, actors, and stakeholders.
2. IMAGINATION | We aim to provide a platform to deliberate on pertinent public policy issues, social challenges, and global issues and collectively imagine new solutions and future scenarios. This is mainly driven by opening up the possibility to break down current realities and unleashing the power of creativity and playfulness in order to re-imagine new alternatives.
3. REFLECTION | We aim to build a brave space where we can identify, question, and assess our deeply-held assumptions and biases – about our knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and actions. This is mainly driven by enhancing critical thinking and taking an intersectional approach.
4. ACTION | We aim to enable synergies between and among various diverse actors and stakeholders that embody collaboration in order to achieve equitable social change. We aim to achieve this by defining concrete actions that are guided by principles of pluriversality and respecting our planetary boundaries.

Around the planet, we are faced with multifaceted crises that have a negative impact on people, communities, society, and our planet as a whole. While in the last decades, significant human progress has been made, these developments have not been consistently equitable.

At the Critical Policy Lab, we envisions a world where policymaking and social change is genuinely intersectional, pluriversal, imaginative, and participatory.

We're building an environment for individuals, academics, communities and institutions that enable reflection, experimentation, imagination, and action.