Laboratoire d ’ Analyse et Modélisation de Systèmes pour d ’ Aide à la Décision UMR 7243 Juin 201 4 Decision aiding in participative contexts : A descriptive model

Organizing multiple stakeholders' participation in decision processes is now a widespread request, especially in public contexts. Therefore, analysts are expected to provide policy makers (the clients) with scientifically sound and practically realizable approaches. However, there remains a question around the ability of existing decision aiding models to adequately answer challenges raised by stakeholder participation. Through an exploration of both the decision aiding and participatory process literatures, we demonstrate the existence of a methodological gap making analyst's interventions extremely limited in their ability to respond to participatory challenges. Our hypothesis is that these limits derive from the focus in decision aiding on the analyst-client interactions leaving the other stakeholders with little explicit space to shape decision process evolution. This focus is nothing but an organizational simplification of reality, which is finally something very usual in all management interventions. However, we will see that this simplification brings several limits in participative contexts. Consequently, we suggest including in the decision aiding process an explicit reflection on the way stakeholders should participate in all steps of the decision process. Through the concept of participation structure, we propose to explicitly consider, in the earliest steps of a decision aiding process, the organizational arrangements through which various stakeholders may interact with the analyst and the client. Finally, we suggest an enhanced model of decision aiding which does not contest existing classic deliverables, but aspires to complement them with new deliverables that will help analysts in more appropriately tackling some of the challenges raised by participative processes.