Page - 20 - in options, Volume winter 2014/2015

20 options + winter 2014/2015 www.iiasa.ac.at I IASA stakeholders include farmers in Africa, Asia, and South America affected by climate change; EU officials and international governments developing air pollution and climate policies; and world leaders at the top levels of global decision-making, including United Nations processes on climate change and sustainable development. “A stakeholder can be anyone with an interest, concern, or knowledge about an issue,” says Joanne Bayer, director of IIASA’s Risk, Policy and Vulnerability Program, “At its most basic level, ‘stakeholder consultation’ just means going to people to get informa- tion that can inform research.” But today, the term means far more: intimate and innovative processes that engage stakeholders in model development and policy formation, not just informing research, but also ensuring that the people involved have ownership of the science. The people behind the models Much IIASA research relies on complex models that can explore future changes across multiple linked areas. Researchers use these models to produce scenarios that can project how different policy choices may lead to different future developments. For example, the Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM) is used to analyze competition between agriculture, bioenergy, and forestry  in land use. GLOBIOM researchers talk to stakeholders to understand what factors drive land use change, and how. But to put these drivers in their model, scientists need numbers, while the farmers and policymakers they work with rarely think in terms of spreadsheets, percentages, and plus and minus signs. IIASA researcher Amanda Palazzo traveled to Nepal, Vietnam, Costa Rica, and Colombia in 2013 to help facilitate a series of scenario-building workshops as part of a project on food security, environment, and rural livelihoods for the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) research program of the global agriculture consortium CGIAR. During the workshops, Palazzo and her colleagues worked step-by-step with the stakeholders to understand what factors they expect to influence future agriculture, working together to develop the verbal descriptions into more quantitative indicators that could be fed into a model. Following the workshop, the researchers then ran the model and came back with a set of scenarios for the stakeholders to discuss. Palazzo says, “We asked them if the scenarios looked credible, and  why or why not, and then we went back to refine them.” When the quantitative modeling results did not fit the context of the region or the storylines, the group made changes, and then ran the model again, repeating until the scenarios seemed useful. from story Stakeholder consultations, engaged scholarship, bottom-up science— Buzzwords in IIASA research, but what do they mean in practice?