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Thus, a combination of qualitative methods and social simulation could prove to be
an ideal tool for the analysis and evaluation of communicative planning processes.
However, there is no broad and general understanding of how to transfer qualitative
research results into agent rules [4], [5]. This paper aims at contributing to fill this gap
by combining three qualitative methods to produce evidence of a political process,
and then demonstrating how this qualitative evidence can be turned into action rules
for agents of a simulation. The simulation should not only be able to reconstruct past
discussions, but also provide a tool to explore different institutional settings in which
these discussions take place.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section will describe
the setting and the details of the political process analyzed. A methodology section
will then focus on the selection of the stakeholders interviewed and the coding of
interviews and observation results. A larger section 4 will describe in detail how the
findings from the empirical phase were transferred into action rules for the agents.
A short discussion of the results will conclude the article.
2
The Setting
Current development programs for rural areas increasingly emphasize the collabora-
tion of regional stakeholders in an attempt to turn planning into integrative and
participatory processes that have been widely discussed and termed as governance
approaches [1], [2]. This has made substantial impact on regional policies for rural
areas in the European Union such as in the LEADER (Liaison entre actions du
développement de l'économie rurale) programs.
The idea of the LEADER program is to bring together stakeholders of different
sections (political, economical and social) to define and pursue development goals for
their rural region. Cooperation between the sectors is strongly encouraged in design-
ing projects that will support the achievement of the defined goals. The project ideas
have to be submitted to a regional assembly (RA) consisting of representatives of all
the three sectors, who discuss the projects and decide about the spending of funds to
support them. Although European, the local implementation can vary due to differing
national regulations as well as more informal understandings of planning in general.
Furthermore, the social practices performed within the external regulations differ
from one another and will be described in more detail in the following sections.
Two study areas were chosen in Eastern Germany and Northern Sweden that both
implement EU-funded, communication based development programs for rural areas in
the LEADER framework. The two study areas are comparable as they are both rural
and sparsely populated and containing a regional centre, even though these characte-
ristics appear on different scales in the two countries.
The meetings are organized by the “regional management”, an institution that con-
sists of usually one or two persons who consult stakeholders in designing projects,
send out invitations to the meetings and supervise the discussion and decision process.
The social processes relevant for this study are described in more detail in the
following chapter, after a brief introduction to the empirical methods used for their
analysis.
