Policy Exercises on Global Environmental Problems

A network of scientists at and in connection with IIASA has been working for several years on the development of Policy Exercises (PEs) to explore the options available for acting on global environmental issues. A number of experimental workshops have shown that the methodology—which uses gaming techniques in a context of scientific research and of policy-making—has a high potential. It has made significant progress, but some basic problems remain, both in design and debriefing. The paper presents some pragmatic options for overcoming them in future developments of PEs. But these difficulties also point to deeper theoretical issues which will have to be addressed fully if PEs are to reach their main objective, that is, to simulate the dynamics of global environmental problems.