ABSTRACT
Governments and developing agencies promote participatory approaches in solving common pool resource problems such as in the water sector. Two main participatory approaches have been applied separately, namely negotiation and mediation. This chapter applies the role-playing game that is a component of the companion modeling approach-a negotiation procedure —and cooperative game theory (Shapley value and the nucleolus solution concepts), which can be mirrored as a mediated mechanism, to a water allocation problem in the Kat basin1 in South Africa. While the absolute results of the two approaches differ, the negotiation and cooperative game theory approaches provide similar shares of the benefit allocated to the players from various cooperative arrangements. By evaluating the two approaches, the chapter provides useful tips for future extension of both the role-playing game and the cooperative game theory applications.
