Introduction

Colombia is a unitary republic, decentralized, with autonomy of its territorial entities. The government is composed of three distinct branches – executive, legislative and judicial – whose powers and duties are vested by the Colombian Constitution. The President and Congress are elected in separate time frames, and for fixed terms, directly by the primary voters. The President is the main public policy agenda setter. He and his cabinet are responsible for defining both the government's priorities as well as the necessary resources to target them, which are laid down through a policy-making process (Mejia-Guinand and Botero, 2018a). This is a procedure that mobilizes both the technocratic resources of the executive, and various political forces of the country. The procedure materializes in the approval of the PND, a technical document that transforms the policy promises made by the President when running for office, into concrete policy goals and investment objectives for his four-year term in office. This framework has been consistent since the enactment of the 1991 Colombian Constitution.

This chapter describes the policy-making process of the Colombian central government. It aims to identify the role of policy analysis in all the stages of the policy cycle, namely planning, budgeting, execution, monitoring and evaluation. For each of these stages, the chapter presents the efforts of the government to develop comprehensive tools to produce useful information for policy decision making. These tools exist and are broadly used; however, the chapter also looks at the institutional restrictions, political factors or lack of incentives in the use of information that constrain the capacity of policy analysis by the central government.

In addition to this introduction, the chapter is organized in the following way. The first section presents the key political actors that participate in Colombia's central government public policy making process. The second section explains how policies are planned, prioritized, budgeted, implemented and evaluated in Colombia, and the third section introduces the political forces that shape the policy-making process and how such actions affect the policy analysis. Last section concludes the chapter.