Stakeholder Categorisation in Participatory Integrated Assessment Processes

Abstract

This paper illustrates how card sorting, a knowledge elicitation method taken from the fields of clinical psychology and knowledge engineering, can be used successfully to elicit stakeholder categorisations from stakeholders in order to inform the design of agent-based models. The paper also describes how such a method can be incorporated into a long-term model-building-as-learning participatory process for the development of sustainable water management solutions. Using this method, it was found that, of the recommended criteria cited in the literature for use in stakeholder categorisations, function and policy networks were also used by stakeholders in the Swiss case study. However, criteria that are currently important to modellers, i.e., scale and aggregation , were apparently not important components of the stakeholders' own mental models of the system. Of the novel criteria that were elicited from the stakeholders, the criteria working relationships , groups who influence , and roles in specific goal implementation have been used to specify interaction diagrams for the design of agent-based models of stakeholder interaction in the Swiss case study. It is recommended that the working relationships criteria is of general use in other stakeholder analysis tasks.