This comprises the knowledge acquired in relation to historical or current technical, social, economic and political data about public problems to be resolved. Although they constitute an essential condition for the development and conduct of effective public policies, relevant knowledge, insight and information are scarce commodities. This is particularly true of contemporary policies which require increasingly sophisticated scientific expertise. In this respect, the successful functioning of public policies generally requires an equivalent level of knowledge of the problem among the actors involved.

The production and processing of statistical data is often assigned to a specialized state service, for example the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. It is also possible for the public actors responsible for a particular policy to organize their own data management (for example, the statistics produced by the individual federal offices in Switzerland) and for private associations to establish their own data monitoring body in parallel to that operated by the state (for example, second opinions, inspections and qualitative testing of water bodies by fishing associations and environmental NGOs, the reports compiled by the national spatial planning and environmental platform ASPAN for the cantons and communes in the context of the implementation of the Spatial Planning Act).

In the case of environmental policies, it is not uncommon for the target groups to have more cognitive resources at their disposal than the administration, for example in the area of hazardous substances (chemicals) and major risks (nuclear threats, banking etc). In these cases, the cooperation between political-administrative actors and target groups can be very close, with the latter contributing to the development of legislative instruments intended to regulate their own future behaviour, a phenomenon that points to the major challenge regarding the independence of public actors. (Knoepfel et al, 2010: 63)