Negotiation Configuration for Policy Decision Making: An Experimental Assessment of an Integrated Approach

Introduction At the start of a complex negotiation process, the relevant issues and actors to join the negotiation process have to be identified. Although the need to identify issues and actors for negotiations has been acknowledged (Lim 1999, Thiessen Loucks and Stedinger 1998, Rangaswamy and Shell 1997) and discussed (Keeney 1992) in the literature on decision making and negotiation analysis, no analytic procedure has been proposed for how to configure the negotiation settings in terms of which actors should negotiate about which issues. In this paper, we propose an integrated analytic approach for the identification of a negotiation configuration (NC), which comprises the relevant issues and actors to be included in a negotiation setting in policy decision making. NC is derived as a subsystem of a social or political system, characterized by a set of decision issues and a set of negotiation actors