Integrated Group Problem Formulation

Résumé 0

Making decisions about land and water management and about urban planning in Europe involves an increasingly diverse range of actors representing heterogeneous stakes, skills and legitimacy. This situation emphasizes the importance of organizing a stage specifically devoted to problem formulation in the negotiation process. The facilitators and institutions managing the discussions are therefore keenly interested in methods and tools that help integrate the viewpoints of each actor into a “common problem”. Our research aims to provide such tools and methods. We propose a conceptual framework in which the problem formulation process involves imbricated and alternating cycles of individual viewpoint elaboration and group discussions, confronting individual viewpoints. Our framework emphasises the crucial role of viewpoint comparison to link individual and group processes. In order to facilitate such comparisons, we assume that viewpoints include a model of the territory and an evaluation (or preference) model. A viewpoint takes as input a hypothetical set of actions and yields as output the set of probable consequences of these actions, and the actor’s evaluation (preference) of these consequences. We argue that the use of such viewpoints and comparison helps to progressively clarify the viewpoints through discussion, to define a collective problem and to organize interactions. Following this framework, we defined and tested an operational method and a software tool called SICOPTER. The operational method organizes the whole process into phases based on simple paper representations of viewpoints and problems. SICOPTER enables the actors to express their preferences about the results of expert territory models and compare them with the other stakeholders’ preferences via computer representations. We present and discuss a set of tests that confirm the interest of viewpoint comparisons to facilitate group problem formulations.