Developing 'playable metagames' for participatory stakeholder analysis

Abstract

If public policy making is viewed as a negotiation process, the complexity of this process will increase roughly in proportion with the number of stakeholders in-volved, the variety of their interests, the variety of available options, and the time frame within which decisions are to be made. The complexity of the negotiation process also depends on the extent to which information on each of these factors is available to the stakeholders. If stakeholders know each other’s means and ends, and if these means and ends remain the same for a certain time span, the negotia-tion is like a puzzle for which some optimal solution can be found. But if the prob-lem is rife with uncertainties and hidden objectives, stakeholders will play strate-gic ‘games’ that may produce unforeseen, unintended and undesirable, but very real effects. The general purpose of stakeholder analysis (Freeman 1984; Donaldson and Preston 1995) is to gain such insight in a policy problem that stakeholder strate-gies can be anticipated and evaluated in terms of the negotiation process and its outcome. If the analysis is transparent and authoritative, it may pre-empt detri-mental strategic behaviour. Analysis of stakeholders, therefore, can make an im-portant contribution to public policy making. The idea to investigate

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