Decoding policy games

Is policy formulation a game?

It is not, but games, and game theory, can help provide insights into how stakeholders will behave in a given circumstance, and how they may react to changes in them.

The just-concluded Paris Climate talks saw an immense amount of preparatory work in most countries (not so much in India). Most of these followed the usual pattern, but one of them was particularly interesting, since it wasn’t a meeting as such, but a game.

The Center for American Progress and the World Wildlife Fund, and amongst others the think tank CAN (whose president Neera Tanden is an influential commentator on India in US television), organised the Food Chain Reaction Game in Washington to simulate the consequences which would emerge as food security becomes a compelling requirement in the context of climate change. The use of a ‘game’ setting to discuss this issue was fascinating. Game theory is all about reactions of different players (stakeholders?) to assumed actions by other ‘players’.

To simulate the ‘game’ is an interesting way of analysing the ‘futures’ or possibilities in an uncertain field. Conventionally, this would be done in voluminous academic tomes, at the end of which the uncertainty remains.

A game, on the other hand, forces the analysts to be specific to the extent possible in an uncertain world.

The context was set up by large countries such as India, China, Brazil, the US and the European Union, continental Africa, the Multilaterals and other groups including business and the media.

They were asked to play their role in the unfolding food security policies in the context of the global trade regime. The first recognition was that the food security problem was not just in grains but in commodities like sugar, oil, animal husbandry products, vegetables and fruit.

In a sense, the problem was more complex than what was foreseen in the last three decades of the last century.The switch away from grain took place at around $3,000 per capita in 1990 purchasing power parity prices. The question really was: how to derive a policy such that distortion in agricultural trade regimes could be removed and incentives for producers established such that a farmer would then take the maximum advantage of his resource endowments of land, water and soil, access to technology and produce the agricultural commodity which goes into the food security in a globally efficient manner?

This was then seen as generating sufficient income for very small peasants and landless labourers. The obstructions to achieving these goals were listed and different exercises were simulated to play their role in removing such obstruction in other ways and through policies.

This would obviously involve collaborative games between countries. If crops cultivated were globally competitive, this exercise would very soon develop an excitingly realistic paradigm, and given the professional commitment of the groups involved, almost realistic processes of communication and trade-offs.

The question really then could be seen as showing a positive outcome that emerged from such cooperation of different actors facing a complex problem, and in that context, pushing them out of short-term, zero-sum policy stances.

The organisers of the game will come out with their detailed profile of the exercise and its outcomes. But the mechanism itself should be of interest in a country where shortages of irrigated land and water are increasingly anticipated. When I was asked to arbitrate the Cauvery dispute many years ago, the most important strategy for me was to get the actors from the garden areas in Karnataka down to the delta of the Cauvery in Tamil Nadu to see how the resolution of the dispute could be around better ways of using water.

That would involve cooperation.

I remember Kannada Prabha front-paging a picture of myself with my hand on a young man’s shoulder. He said, “we wanted to separate from you” and I responded, “you cannot because I will not separate from you”. He said, I cannot continue with injustice, to which my reply was: let us fight it together.

We devised a three-tier system which was earlier tried in the Mekong where countries which had gone to war with each other cooperated in a plan providing the minimum flow of water to the downstream Tonle Sap in the monsoon, where the requirements of half a million persons had to be protected and this required changes going up stream all the way.

The Asian peasant is the product of a millennium of history and if policy is honest then he will always respond.

The writer is a former Union minister

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