Tools for Stakeholder Assessment and Interaction

Stakeholders play an increasing role in environmental policy and are key actors in the supposed sustainability transition (O`Rìordan/Stoll-Kleemann 2002). Characterizing their role as well as the transition itself requires a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of social networks and the relationship between individual and collective action. In many models, used in integrated assessment, a top-down rational controller drives the world into a desired direction, optimizing a global welfare function, notwithstanding the fact that the development of the real world is affected by numerous agents which act according to their own interests and capabilities. Sustainable development strategies often fail due to their inability to adequately take social interaction into consideration, such as dialogues, negotiations, conflicts, coalition formation and institution building. Usually collective action is seen as a problem in common pool resources (such as fishery), where unregulated resource access by a group of individuals leads to resource depletion and the violation of common interests, as can be observed in the so-called “Tragedy-of-the-Commons” (Hardin 1968, Ostrom 1990).