35 research outputs found
Interactive Actor Analysis for Rural Water Management in The Netherlands
Recent developments in the policy sciences emphasize the social environment
in which decisions are made. The ‘network metaphor’ is often used to describe
the key role of interactions between interdependent actors involved in decision
making. These interactions take place in a policy arena drawn up by actors with an
interest in and control over decisions on the issues addressed. Interdependencies,
caused by the need for actors to increase their means of realizing objectives, are
the driving force behind these interactions. Dependency relations are of special
interest to water management and river basin management because of the fundamental
asymmetrical interdependencies that exist in river basins between upstream
and downstream stakeholders. Coleman’s linear system of action models decision
making process involving dependencies between multiple stakeholders as exchange
of control over issues, while interactions are required to negotiate exchanges of
control. We developed an interactive method for actor analysis based on Coleman’s
linear system of action and applied it to the national rural water management policy
domain in The Netherlands. The method is firmly rooted in mathematical sociology
and defies the criticism that methods for actor and stakeholder analysis do not specify
a theoretical basis explaining the causal relations between the variables analyzed and
policy change. With the application to the rural water management policy arena we
intended to increase our insight into the practical applicability of this analyticmethod
in an interactive workshop, the acceptability of the approach for the participating
actors, its contribution to the process of decision making and our understanding of
the rural water management policy arena in The Netherlands. We found that the
Association of Water Authorities, the Ministry of Public Works and the Ministry of
Agriculture are the most powerful actor in the policy domain, while governance and
cost and benefits of rural water management are the most salient issues. Progress
in policy development for rural water management is probably most promising for the issues governance, costs and benefits, safety and rural living conditions through
improved interaction between the Association of Water Authorities, the Ministry of
Agriculture and the Rural Credit Bank. Besides these analytic results the interactive
approach implemented increased the participants understanding of their dependency
on other actors in the rural water management policy domain and supported them
in developing a sound perspective on their dependency position. We concluded
that the method developed is acceptable to real-world policy decision makers, can
successfully be applied in an interactive setting, potentially contributes to the process
of decision making by increasing the participants understanding of their dependency
position, has the potential to delivers valuable advice for future decision-making and
increases our understanding of policy development for rural water management in
general
Strategic control and interests, its effects on decision outcomes
In political systems and large organizations, ultimate decision makers are usually just a small subset of all actors in the social system. To arrive at acceptable decisions, decision makers have to take into account the preferences of other actors in the system. Typically preferences of more interested and more powerful actors are weighted heavier than those of less interested and powerful actors. This implies that the total leverage of an actor on the decision is determined by the combination of his power (his potential) and his interest (his willingness to mobilize his power). As the exact level of an actor's leverage is difficult to estimate for the other actors in the system, an actor is able to optimize his effects on outcomes of decisions by providing strategic information. In this paper, first an analytic solution is presented for the optimization of strategic leverage in collective decision making by one single actor. In this solution, the actor makes assumptions about the leverage other actors will show in decision making. Subsequently, the actor optimizes the outcomes of decisions by manipulating the distribution of his leverage over a set of issues. The analytic solution can be theoretically interpreted by decomposing the solution into three terms, the expected external leverage of the other actors on the issue, the evaluation of the deviance of the expected from the preferred outcome of the issue, and the restrictions on the distribution of leverage over the issues. The higher the expectation of the leverages the other actors will allocate to the issue, the less an actor is inclined to allocate leverage to the issue. The higher the evaluation of the deviance, the more an actor is inclined to allocate leverage to the issue. This is restricted, however, by the required distribution of leverages over the issues. The researcher is able to manipulate these restrictions to investigate its consequences for the outcomes. In the next step, we investigate whether we can find a Nash equilibrium if all actors optimize their leverage simultaneously. Under certain conditions, a Nash equilibrium can be found by an iterative process in which actors update their estimates oh each other's leverages on the basis of what the other actors have shown in previous iterations. Application of the model to artificial data shows that actors with strong preferences in the center have more possibilities to realize good outcomes than other actors. On the basis of an empirical application it is shown that a Nash equilibrium does not always arise after a large number of iterations unless actors have learning capabilities or are severely restricted in their strategic behavior