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Implementation stage is another mean to empower participants. It is often implic-
itly framing. But empowerment through involving stakeholders in this technical
activity is rather to raise their literacy in this part and raise the probability of their
appropriation of the model. Simulation stage is basically providing information to
stakeholders on what is being done. This is a technical stage (running the simulation)
which keeps a part of strategic choices (design of scenarios and indicators to track
the simulation progress). Involvement of stakeholders in the technical part, such as
through role-playing games, increases their knowledge of the model from inside,
provided stakeholders have the literacy for that. Involvement in strategic part is
connected to the initial stage which has set the agenda. The further this initialisation
has gone in formalising the questions, the less empowering is this involvement.

12.4.2 Level of Involvement

Level of involvement is a more classical dimension. It is inspired by the classical
hierarchy of participation levels proposed first by Arnstein (1969). Several reviews
and adaptations have been made since then, with the same focus on power issues
(Mostert 2006; van Asselt et al. 2001). These works focus on what participation
means in decision-making terms (the bases of many political or democratic the-
ories), with democracy cube (Fung 2006)orthe work of Pateman(1990) and
Rocha (1997). In most of these examples, the emphasis is placed on who (citizens,
managers or policymakers) has the balance of power for final decision-making (i.e.
the choice phase of a decision process (Simon 1977)), but other issues of process
are not specifically mentioned. Such participation classifications, although useful
in a very general sense for the question of participation in modelling processes, do
not explicitly treat the issue of the place of a modeller or researchers with expert
knowledge (Daniell et al. 2006).
On these bases, we consider here the five following levels in which there are
at least some interactions between a group of citizens and a group of decision
makers:
– Information supply: citizens are provided access to information. This is not
genuine participation since it is a one-way interaction.
– Consultation: solicitation of citizens’ views.
– Co-thinking: real discussions between both groups.
– Co-design: citizens have an active contribution in policy design.
– Co-decision-making: decisions are taken jointly by members of both groups.
Since a modelling process is a kind of decision process, this hierarchy might
apply to modelling process as well. This is a little bit more complicated because two
processes are behind the modelling process, and the network of interactions cannot
be represented with a group of citizens and a group of decision or policymakers
only.