There is no single 'best way' of policy development. Bottom-up approaches to policy design and a broad debate among stakeholders facilitate policy learning and innovation. A novel approach of a bottom-up policy design process involving stakeholders is introduced. First results obtained by this methodology are presented. The outcomes of a large international effort in Mai 2004 in developing organic farming policy in Europe are presented: the synthesized results from 11 European countries (AT, CH, CZ, DE, DK, EE, GB, HU, IT, PL, SI) on the current situation of organic farming policy in Europe and policy recommendations for the development of the organic farming sector.