Models in Policy Formulation and Assessment: The WadBOS Decision-Support System - Environmental Modelling: Finding Simplicity in Complexity - page 334

21

Models in Policy Formulation
and Assessment: The WadBOS
Decision-Support System

Guy Engelen
Vlaamse Instelling voor Technologisch Onderzoek (VITO), Mol, Belgium

or users that steer the development in a direction of
their own interest (Chapter 18). Confronted with this
complexity on the one hand and with better informed,
agile recipients of the policies on the other, policymakers
have to be able to rely on adequate instruments enabling
them to understand better and anticipate the effects of
their interventions in the system as fully as possible.
As a result, today's policy programmes strongly
advocate integrated policies for land-use management,
watershed management, and coastal zone management
amongst others, and today's research and development
agendas strongly promote the development of the tools
that enable an integrated approach. The work is propelled
by the revolution in computing hardware and software
since the beginning of the 1980s, putting computation
power on the desk of the individual scientist, modeller
and decision-maker that could not be dreamed of 30
years ago. Information systems of growing levels of
sophistication go along with the increasing capacity of
the personal and micro-computer. Most relevant in the
field of spatial planning and policymaking has been
the rapid growth of high resolution remote sensing
and geographical information systems in the past two
decades. Many users of the latter techniques are interested
in the detail only - the precise knowledge of what is
where - but there is a growing community of users and
developers exploiting their potential for high-resolution
spatial modelling and its use as part of policy-support
instruments. As a result new modelling techniques have

21.1 Introduction

Since the mid-1990s, an increasing number of
government organizations have started to develop
rather sophisticated model-based information systems to
support the policymaking process. The development of
so-called policy-support systems is currently a booming
activity. A few examples only from the Netherlands are:
IMAGE (Alcamo, 1994), TARGETS (Rotmans and de
Vries, 1997), L andscape P lanning of the river R hine-DSS
(Schielen, 2000), and Environment Explorer (de Nijs
et al ., 2001). This trend is propelled by the growing
understanding that policymaking should be based on an
integrated approach. Systems theory clearly has shown
that systems and problems do not exist in isolation;
rather, they are part of larger entities (see, for example,
Sterman, 2000). They have dimensions that extent into
other domains, other disciplines, other levels of detail,
and other temporal and spatial scales. Complexity and
computation theory has shown that even seemingly weak
linkages may have major repercussions on the behaviour
of the system as a whole (see, for example, Prigogine,
1981; Kauffman, 1990). Policymakers, responsible for
the management of cities, watersheds, or coastal zones
are confronted with this reality on a daily basis. They
are required to manage fragile systems that exhibit
an extremely rich behaviour not in the least because
of the many intelligent actors, the human inhabitants