Plural Rationality Approach (PRA)

Metadata

Format

Tool

Release date

1 year 11 months ago

IIASA collaborators

Population and Just Societies (POPJUS)

Equity and Justice (EQU)

External collaborators

License

Custom

Last edited

06 February 2023

The Equity and Justice (EQU) Research Group has developed a number of decision-support and process-oriented methods. These tools help stakeholders and policy-makers make sense of the complex governance landscape, while clarifying trade-offs and synergies associated with alternative policy options.

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The engagement of public stakeholders is increasingly seen as an integral part of policy-making. By enhancing public awareness and bringing new and locally-oriented options to light, stakeholder processes can delineate the space for agreement or compromise, thereby enhancing the credibility and longer-term support for public policies.

Plural Rationality Approach (PRA)

Combining institutional mapping, semi-structured stakeholder interviews, and face-to-face deliberation, the PRA provides a structured diagnosis of complex policy issues and offers a step-by-step approach to stakeholder facilitation and policy co-designing.

Based on the Theory of Plural Rationality (TPR), this approach clarifies alternative (and often conflicting) stakeholder preferences supporting or opposing policy options/instruments. These arise due to deep-seated differences in "world views" – i.e. socially constructed beliefs as to how and to what extent individual choices should be restricted according to group norms and established rules. The PRA guides decision-makers and researchers through pluralistic policy-making, with an ultimate aim towards designing a socially-robust policy package that combines authoritative control, market incentives, and bottom-up collaboration.

FAST FACTS

PRA has been used in a number of cases such as SafeLand.
In 2017, the Water-Food-Energy Nexus Game was developed as part of a SE4 all/UNDP-CAPNET initiative to raise awareness of the decision-making complexity surrounding water-food-energy nexus issues.

Grauer, M., Thompson, M., & Wierzbicki, A.P. (1985). Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes; Proceedings of an IIASA Summer Study on Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes, Sopron, Hungary, August 16-26, 1984. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540-15675-5

Wierzbicki, A. (1985). Negotiation and mediation in conflicts: II. Plural rationality and interactive decision processes. In: Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes. pp. 114-131 Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. ISBN 978-3-662-02432-4 10.1007/978-3-662-02432-4_9.

Beck, M.B., Gyawali, D., & Thompson, M. (2018). Societal Drivers of Food and Water Systems 2: Applying Plural Rationality to Some Wicked Problems. In: The Oxford Handbook of Food, Water and Society. Eds. Allan, T., Bromwich, B., Colman, A., & Keulertz, M., Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-066979-9 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190669799.013.62.