Acknowledging and embracing the complexities of the day, we started working on the NDS against the backdrop of the Global Covid Pandemic that brought multitude changes to our everyday lives and challenged the way our public systems and businesses operate. Moreover, our society faced and still faces social polarization, prolonged EU accession as well as a certain detachment from people from the public policymaking processes in the country combined with some distrust in the public sector. In this context we started our support towards institutions in formulating the country’s National Development Strategy. With the NDS process we were guided by several questions that we thought are important for governance and policymaking in the country and were a part of our broader experimental and innovative approach.

The guiding, learning questions behind our activities, included:

Can we get people, institutions, civil society, and other actors engaged and excited about policymaking?

 Can we learn from innovative experiences from other countries and embed them in this policymaking process?

Can we build societal capabilities to deal with long term and cascading global challenges of the next twenty years?

 Can we construct common societal aspirations for the future, and use them as a development path, something that we can jointly follow and work collectively towards achieving?