Designing a power tool for policy analysts

Abstract

For policy analysts, knowledge about the values and opinions of the actors involved in a decision making situation is more important than knowledge about the factors in such a situation. Finding out how actors perceive a situation, or - to be more realistic - reflecting on the consequences if actor perceptions were such-and-so, may well be the primary task of a policy analyst. In this paper, we present a conceptual modeling approach to actor network analysis, and a computerized support tool we are in the process of developing. The modeling language is based on the policy network paradigm and embodies concepts from cognitive mapping and linguistic approaches to approximate reasoning. The present tool design includes support for `gut feeling analysis', graphical rendering of perceptions, and a range of analytic queries.