In today’s world, the process of policy development has moved beyond merely identifying the right objectives or designing well-intentioned interventions. The core difficulty now lies in establishing a causal framework within an increasingly complex social reality. Even 20 years ago, it was not easy to clearly distinguish cause-and-effect relationships in social phenomena. Yet, today, with the deep penetration of digital technologies, artificial intelligence applications and numerous interfaces into everyday life, this difficulty appears to have undergone a qualitative leap. In other words, as life has become more complex compared to the recent past, the intersections between different spheres of life have increased significantly. Consequently, the first major challenge in policy-making is identifying causal linkages, while the second is that problems themselves have become far more complex as the points of contact between previously distinct domains have multiplied due to contemporary life dynamics. Moreover, this complexity continues to intensify.
Therefore, developing policies to address a problem in a given domain requires not only an understanding of the intersection set that directly affects that domain, but also detailed knowledge of the other factors influencing each of those intersecting areas. Indeed, while identifying the causal context of a problem within a single field has always been difficult, as domains become more complex, establishing causal relationships becomes increasingly challenging. In this context, classical sector-based approaches to policy-making prove inadequate. Perhaps the growing tendency for problems to become chronic in recent years stems, on the one hand, from an insufficient understanding of this increasingly complex context, and on the other, from the difficulty of identifying causal relationships within these complex domains.
At this stage, the policies to be developed now go beyond the remit of a single institution and necessitate a multi-actor structure. The link between the source of a problem and its outcomes is dispersed across different institutional domains. Therefore, establishing causality accurately is no longer merely a matter of analytical capacity, but has also become an issue of institutional coordination and the production of shared judgment. Otherwise, even if each institution takes steps that appear rational within its own narrow sphere of responsibility, the resulting overall impact remains limited or fails to deliver the expected outcomes, leading to a decline in efficiency.
For example, the issue of addiction stands out as one of the most striking illustrations of this transformation. Addiction can no longer be reduced solely to substance use; it now encompasses an ever-expanding intersection that includes digital addictions, online gambling, online gaming, patterns of social media use, and, of course, broader socioeconomic processes. Each of these domains touches upon different regulatory frameworks, different institutions and different social dynamics. Consequently, combating addiction is no longer a policy field that can be handled through a single institutional channel. Unless a strong causal framework is established across health, education, security, communication, the economy, social policy and local governments, the measures taken either remain fragmented or are limited to addressing only the most visible aspects of the problem.
A similar situation is clearly evident in education and youth policies as well. The era of trying to exert guiding or indoctrinating influences on young people through curriculum changes is largely behind us. This is because the areas young people engage with have expanded far beyond the walls of the school and have become increasingly complex. Digital platforms, online content, new forms of relationships, identity-building processes and types of addiction are transforming the world of young people into a multi-layered structure. With such a fragmented and intense interaction space, it is becoming increasingly difficult for policies that are limited to schools alone to produce a lasting impact.
Similar challenges are also felt in policies aimed at addressing the water problem. Just as data has increasingly become a strategic factor shaping the fate of societies and states, water is now emerging as one of the most critical determinants of the future. However, the water issue has also been affected by the growing complexity of life, with the number of influencing domains expanding. For this reason, water policy is one of the areas that most clearly exposes the crisis of causality confronting contemporary policy-making. The issue of water can no longer be treated as a purely technical problem addressed solely through supply and infrastructure; rather, it has taken on a multilayered character intertwined with climate change, industrial waste, urbanization and especially agricultural production policies. For example, promoting crops with high water demand in regions where water resources are extremely limited may generate a strong correlation between production and income, yet in the long term, it leads to the depletion of groundwater resources and the erosion of agricultural sustainability. This clearly demonstrates that agricultural policies cannot be considered independently of water management, and that subsidies, incentives, and crop patterns must be designed in alignment with regional water reserves.
In this context, another issue that deserves attention is clearly visible in the demographic transformation that has been deepening in many countries today. Declining population growth rates, fertility levels falling below the replacement threshold, and the rapid aging of societies may at first glance appear to be a singular population policy problem; in reality, however, they involve an exceptionally broad set of intersecting factors. Economic insecurity, housing and living costs, patterns of women’s participation in education and employment, caregiving burdens, working life, urbanization dynamics, and transformations in cultural values are only some of the source domains of this issue. Consequently, in many countries, pursuing isolated interventions – such as birth incentives, financial supports, or leave regulations – without implementing aggressive and mutually coherent policies across all these source domains tends to produce only limited and temporary effects, allowing the problem to become increasingly chronic. The demographic challenge thus offers a striking example of how, in contemporary policy-making processes, the growing interpenetration of problem domains makes it increasingly difficult to fully establish a clear causal framework.
However, at this point, the issue is not only about producing policies that encompass multiple domains through causal relationships. The truly critical threshold lies in the ability to implement these policies simultaneously, coherently and with high motivation on the ground. In environments where institutions are not fully aware of one another and where data and experience sharing remain limited, causal linkages quickly break down. Even if each institution observes the outcomes of its own intervention, the secondary effects these outcomes generate in other domains often remain invisible. Yet in tackling complex problems, success depends not merely on institutions pursuing the same objective, but on their awareness that they share the same underlying context.
This picture clearly reveals the fundamental challenge of policy-making today. Problems are no longer isolated but interwoven; causes are not linear but often cyclical; and areas of intervention are not centralized but involve multiple actors. In such an environment, effective policy production requires not only accurate diagnosis but also strong coordination among institutions that share this diagnosis, a common language and a sustained will to implement. When a causal framework cannot be established, or when it becomes fragmented across institutional boundaries, even well-intentioned policies struggle to generate the expected social transformation. For this reason, the central policy challenge of our time is the construction of institutional and cognitive capacities capable of managing complexity itself.
