How do ideas become policies? What route do they take from inception to
implementation and what criteria are used to evaluate one set of
proposals against another? This paper examines the development of the
Creative Work Fellowship policy proposal in Limerick, tracing the
origins of the idea, itself a contended and negotiated object, from
discussions between academics and policy-makers through to scoping,
pitching and scaling the policy to its eventual users. This policy idea
was designed during the Intelligence Unit (IU) commissioned by
Limerick2020 as part of the city’s bid to become European Capital of
Culture in 2020. The IU took the form of a policy think-tank, tasked
with generating insights, ideas and policy proposals into the place of
culture within Limerick city and region. The IU structure created a set
of actors and an epistemic community capable of both generating and
using ideas effectively, chiefly through two mechanisms. The first
involved a robust critique and rebuilding process that every element of
the policy was exposed to; the second involved feedback from interested
parties at specific stages in the process. This created a series of
“policy entrepreneurs” capable of taking a fully costed and modelled
policy suggestion to government. The findings presented in the paper
include an analysis of the collaborative nature of this policy
development process, Based on this framework, we also consider the role
of the European City of Culture bid process as catalyst for policy
development in a regional context, and present findings on this subject.