This week we have been focused on a role-play based on the fictional island of “Ramandus”. The population on the island is solated from the rest of the world, and has undergone a strong population growth up until recently. Food is becoming more scarce and several citizens have expressed an increasing worry that we might be overexploiting the island. That’s where we come in – questions we have had to deal with include what policy instruments we could use to ensure that we don’t overuse our resources? How do we break the current population development trend? How do we ensure that by creating a government we are laying the cornerstones to a democracy and keeping several interest groups happy?
It’s been a week of turns and twists, but I think we’ve all come out of it with much more respect for the difficulties in creating effective and constructive policy, not to speak of trying to stem changing trends.