Abstract for:Stakeholder Interaction Theory: Merging Goal Mapping, Stakeholder Analysis, and Feedback Mapping

Summary:  The premise of this paper is that understanding stakeholders and the systems of goals that they seek to attain is an important and under-exploited way to map, model, and ultimately understand feedback dynamics in complex systems.  We describe details necessary to consider in designing formal scripts to do this, based on a multi-decade set of discussions and interactions involving mapping and modeling sessions with client groups.  In Part 1 we observe that stakeholders seeking to attain their goals can be represented in interacting classic goal-gap structures of increasing complexity long familiar to the system dynamics community.  Part 2 presents an illustrative example focusing on the use of mosquito nets in sub-Sahara Africa to combat malaria. Part 3 explores ideas to be taken into account in designing explicit scripts for group model building. An appendix delves into the complexities client goals and goal structures.