Abstract for: Evaluating Participatory Systems Dynamics: a protocol

Whilst participation is accepted as an essential component of System Dynamics (SD), there is limited literature evaluating the effectiveness of participation in practice. There are few attempts to investigate the validity of the many claims that have been made for stakeholder participation, namely an “evaluation gap” exists. Moreover, the lack of widely held criteria for judging success or failure represents a significant barrier to the evaluation of participatory modelling. With this in mind, the authors built an evaluation plan using principles from the evaluation research field, at the start of a participatory SD modelling process, to understand and learn from the development of the model, in relation to its processes, outputs, outcomes and (where possible) the impacts that could be attributed to its creation and use. Therefore, this talk, discusses how we created, refined and applied evaluation principles to assess the role of participatory SD in a three-year case study investigating the use of natural urban space.