A Policy Delphi study in the socialist Middle East

Abstract

The Delphi Method has been applied to a wide variety of predictive and consensus building problems in the West. It has achieved mixed success in its ‘native’ environment. This paper reports on the successful use of the Delphi by an interdisciplinary, international team of English‐speaking consultants in an Arabic‐speaking country, politically dominated by a centralist regime. In the sixth year of the Iran‐Iraq war, a group of international consultants proceeded with the development of a master plan for the development of the City of Baghdad, the Greater Baghdad Area and Central Iraq. Work on the plan had begun in 1982 but had been slowed by the war and its effect on the Iraqi economy, a lack of consensus on the part of the Iraqi government and a substantial degree of uncertainty in the government's confidence in the consulting team's perceptions. An accelerated form of the Delphi was structured and applied over a period of three weeks, employing high ranking members of the Iraqi technocracy. The results indicated a good degree of consensus on a number of material issues. The consultants obtained a clearer picture of the client's desires, and the client was left with greater confidence in the consultant's perceptions of the planning problems and solutions. There was a notable reduction in the level of uncertainty and disagreement among both Iraqi and expatriate members of the planning team. Finally, there was an increased acceptance of the resulting master plan due to the demonstrable participation of senior government officials in its formulation and the credibility they attached to the process of the Delphi. At the time of writing, the plan has been accepted by the government of Iraq.

Beyond consensus: an alternative use of Delphi enquiry in hospitality research

“…Policy Delphi has been used in public administration and business management research to examine, among other issues, consumer problems in a marketing system (Wikstrom, 1978), city planning and development in the Middle East (Smit & Mason, 1990), public health issues (Rainhorn et al, 1994;O'Loughlin & Kelly, 2004), public administration policies (Buck et al, 1993;Critcher & Gladstone, 1998), taxation issues (Evans & Walpole, 1999) and organisational strategic planning (Akkermans et al, 1999;Mara, 2000). However despite its use for identifying the spread of expert opinion, the authors have been unable to find examples of its use in hospitality research other than one presented here.…”