Developing ‘playable metagames’ for participatory stakeholder analysis

If public policy making is viewed as a negotiation process, the complexity of this process will increase roughly in proportion with the number of stakeholders involved, the variety of their interests, the variety of available options, and the time frame within which decisions are to be made. The complexity of the negotiation process also depends on the extent to which information on each of these factors is available to the stakeholders. If stakeholders know each other’s means and ends, and if these means and ends remain the same for a certain time span, the negotiation is like a puzzle for which some optimal solution can be found. But if the problem is rife with uncertainties and hidden objectives, stakeholders will play strategic ‘games’ that may produce unforeseen, unintended and undesirable, but very real effects. The general purpose of stakeholder analysis (Freeman 1984; Donaldson and Preston 1995) is to gain such insight in a policy problem that stakeholder strategies can be anticipated and evaluated in terms of the negotiation process and its outcome. If the analysis is transparent and authoritative, it may pre-empt detrimental strategic behaviour. Analysis of stakeholders, therefore, can make an important contribution to public policy making. The idea to investigate participatory stakeholder analysis finds its roots in the developments in participatory policy analysis and planning (Durning 1993; Mayer 1997), which emphasises the functional role of discourse and learning in these processes. Active stakeholder participation in the analysis of ill-structured problems is seen to enhance both the substantive quality (scope of the analysis, use of available knowledge) and the procedural quality (mutual understanding, trust, willingness to act) of the problem solving process. This view might also apply to analysis of stakeholders. While searching the literature for a method for stakeholder analysis that might be used in a participatory mode, we came across metagame theory (Howard 1971). As the name suggests, the metagame approach involves framing a situation as a