Systems analytic support to policy design: inspiration and implications from social science perspectives

Decision problems in which multiple actors with different interests play a role abound in fields like transport policy, telecommunications policy, water resource management, and environmental management. As, in essence, decision making is a process of and between the actors, the social sciences have relevant insights to offer to analysts who aim to support decision makers in these situations. This paper briefly outlines a number of social science models of multi-actor decision making, and explores their consequences for systems analytic support. Given the variety of social science models and of multi-actor decision situations, a meta-design problem emerges: what line of approach to follow, and which tools to use in what situation? A few elementary guidelines for this methodological design problem are given.