Philip O’Sullivan
Ian O’Flynn
David Russell
A Shared Future?
When people from different ethnic, religious or national communities have
decided to live together peacefully, it becomes necessary to consider both how
much they are going to share and on what basis this sharing might occur.
To help answer these questions elected representatives, and those who advise
them, may decide there is a need for a strategic framework—one that sets a
direction for public policy and against which the effectiveness of government
initiatives to promote sharing can be measured. But this will not always be the
case. Sharing is, after all, a complex and even complicated business, and the
idea of developing a strategic framework that determines how and what to share
may be viewed as an unnecessary constraint or limitation. Indeed, decisions of
this sort might just a readily be made piecemeal through ongoing deliberations
in response to a given area of public policy and which afford decision-makers a
greater degree of freedom and flexibility.