Consultation on draft laws is a familiar part of good policymaking. What is less familiar is a digital platform designed specifically to collect, structure, and analyse that feedback at scale. The UAE Ministry of Economy and Tourism launched one in 2025, starting with the federal SME law.

The dilemma

Consultation on draft legislation has long been part of how governments make better laws. The people affected by a rule usually understand it best, and inviting them to comment helps drafters catch problems that would otherwise emerge only after the law takes effect. But traditional consultation is time-consuming and hard to compare across contributions. Written submissions come in different formats, from different types of stakeholders, and often need extensive manual processing before their substance can be used. When a country is drafting laws for a fast-moving economy, the pace of consultation can become a real constraint on the pace of legislation itself.

The regulatory gap

What was needed was a way to make legislative consultation both faster and more structured. Faster, so that a draft law could benefit from stakeholder feedback within the timeframe a modern legislative process requires. Structured, so that the feedback could be analysed consistently, compared across contributors, and handed to legislative committees in a form they could actually use. Achieving both meant treating consultation as a data problem rather than a paperwork problem, and building the infrastructure to match.

The approach

In 2025, the UAE Ministry of Economy and Tourism launched a Digital Legislative Consultation Platform, beginning with the federal SME law. The platform allows the Ministry to design structured digital surveys tailored to the specific draft under consultation, invite stakeholders to complete them through a defined process, and generate analysis for legislative committees automatically.

The design is hybrid. It is outcome-focused in how consultation results feed into policymaking, giving weight to the evidence quality of what stakeholders say rather than to the format of their submissions. But it is prescriptive in its underlying data structure, with defined survey fields, formats, and validation rules that ensure contributions can be compared and aggregated.

The platform is designed to be modular. New laws, new surveys, and new analytics tools can be added without redesigning the underlying system. The Ministry has framed the SME law consultation as Phase 1, with planned expansion to cover all Ministry of Economy and Tourism laws and regulations over time. Later phases will introduce sentiment analysis on stakeholder responses and version tracking for draft laws as they evolve through consultation.

The Ministry has designed the platform to align with international standards for open policymaking, including the OECD Principles on Open and Inclusive Policy Making, the OECD framework for regulatory impact assessment, and the World Bank Regulatory Governance Indicators. This alignment is intended to make the platform's outputs interoperable with international consultation methodologies over time.

Results achieved so far

The Ministry reports increased participation in the SME law consultation, drawing input from SMEs, business owners, chambers of commerce, government partners, and legal specialists. It reports that consultation questions and summaries were fully published, contributing to legislative transparency. It reports that structured datasets were generated automatically for legislative committees, and that stakeholder feedback directly shaped amendments to specific provisions of the SME law. The Ministry has also indicated that the digital process cut consultation cycle time by 40 to 60% compared to manual consultation methods, and that the platform is now the first unified digital method for legislative consultation across the Ministry.

One limit is worth noting. The platform is in its first phase, focused on a single law. Its longer-term impact, particularly whether the model can scale across all Ministry laws and whether the standardisation of consultation formats maintains quality of engagement as it expands, will only be clear as later phases roll out. Independent evaluation of the platform's outcomes is not yet available.

The transferable lesson

The Ministry has designed the platform to align with the OECD Principles on Open and Inclusive Policy Making, the OECD framework for regulatory impact assessment, and the World Bank Regulatory Governance Indicators. That alignment matters beyond the technical alignment of formats. The OECD's principles set expectations for what open policymaking should deliver in practice: participation that is broad, transparency that is real, and evidence that actually informs legislative choices. The World Bank's indicators focus on whether consultation processes are systematic and whether their results are accessible to stakeholders.

A digital consultation platform, on its own, does not deliver any of this. What delivers it is the combination of the platform, the commitment to publish consultation questions and summaries, and the analytical capacity to turn stakeholder input into structured evidence for legislative committees. The UAE case shows one way of putting these three pieces together in a single national approach.