Policy Development for Societal Challenges: The Collaborative Agent Based Modelling Policy Framework

Developing effective policies to address societal challenges is difficult. Involved stakeholders often have different (disciplinary) backgrounds and have different incentives and are thus not always willing to support suggested policies. Policy developers, on their own, have a hard time to compile all the relevant knowledge from the stakeholders, interpret the dynamics between stakeholders and provide effective policies that will be accepted by all. It has been argued for a long time that Agent Based Modelling (ABM) can help policy developers understand the complex societal challenges and devise better policies. Due to its accessible nature, ABM also lends itself well for participatory modelling to involve stakeholders in the policy process. This improves the quality of the policy model and the willingness of the stakeholders to accept a resulting policy. In this paper we argue that a major obstacle for the acceptance and uptake of ABM in policy development is that we have failed to properly fit ABM in the policy development process. We propose a new framework that aims to make ABM an effective tool within the policy development process. We focus on building an ABM with stakeholders as part of the overall policy making process. The framework is a result of our experiences with policy development in the Netherlands and how ABM is perceived as added value in that context. We illustrate the use and possible impact of the framework with a case-study.