Page - 10 - in options, Volume summer 2020

E ngaging actors across governments, businesses, civil society organizations, and the public has become essential to informing the complex policy issues decision makers are faced with today. To this end, IIASA researchers are applying system concepts such as citizen science, smart games, role-playing, and policy exercises to support research and to aid stakeholders in co-designing and co-generating policy options that recognize the unique perspectives and knowledge of others, thus leveling the policy field so that stakeholders become partners in developing solutions. “A benefit of these approaches is that the whole social learning process is really enhanced. Rather than researchers sitting behind their desks and trying to unravel a problem, we can interact with others and initiate a process of bidirectional learning, in other words, we learn what is relevant to the people affected by a particular problem or situation, while they can also understand how we see things. It’s really all about encouraging interaction and building trust to ultimately arrive at better decisions,” says Piotr Magnuszewski, an IIASA researcher who has experimented with innovative co-design methods and applications. A role-playing exercise developed at IIASA to manage flood risk in a municipality plagued by stakeholder conflicts and implementation stalemates, serves as a good example of the value of including the views of multiple stakeholder groups in decision-making processes. In this instance, the stakeholder participants dealt with simulated tasks on climate risk management at the municipal level by putting themselves in the shoes of their counterparts on the other side of the negotiations. By seeing the problems through the eyes of others, the participants were better able to co-generate compromise measures to deal with the escalating flood risk, and importantly, identify the ‘problem owners’ or the responsible institutions and persons that could help overcome the implementation gap. In another study, the authors for the first time combined a gaming approach with cultural theory to shed light on the mechanisms that govern human-environment interactions when it comes to the sustainable use of common resources. The researchers designed a forest- harvesting game to see how awareness of additional risks affects the sustainable management of a resource. The objective was for participants to harvest trees to generate income, while the forest also served as protection against © Anker | Dreamstime GROUPS POLICYMAKING FOR BETTER ENGAGING DIVERSE How can system an alysts engage in, or even co-design and imp lement, processes that provide inclusive, e ffective, and inform ed policy guidance? II ASA researchers ar e at the forefront of ad dressing this quest ion. 10 Options Summer 2020 www.iiasa.ac.at