Computer-supported cognitive mapping for participatory problem structuring

The environmental management and planning community is struggling with a gap between knowledge and policy making. To bridge this gap, 'decision support systems, 'planning support systems', and other computer tools have been developed to make knowledge about complex issues more accessible for policy makers. However, the use of these systems in practice is limited. One major reason for this is that these systems are designed for well-defined problems, whereas in practice there is often a lack of stakeholder consensus on the problem structure. The aim of this paper is to present, and explore the potential of, a new approach for decision and planning support. The Quasta tool aims at facilitating participatory problem structuring through computer-supported cognitive mapping. The tool, allowing qualitative exploration of scenarios and simultaneous forecasting and backcasting, is tested in four participatory problem-structuring workshops, in which various environmental issues have been discussed. Evaluations of these workshops show that this approach (1) helps stakeholders to become aware of causal relationships, (2) is useful for a qualitative exploration of scenarios, (3) identifies the need for further (in-depth) knowledge, and (4) has a low threshold for nontechnicians.