Extending Systems Analysis to Public Policy Planning: Revisiting the IIASA-IAEA Cooperation between 1975-1979

This paper contribution highlights how the international framework of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) distributed management and planning knowledge for policy making problems of industrialized countries amid the Cold War (1972-1979). Founded in 1972 near Vienna (Austria) by twelve national member organizations, IIASA dedicated its efforts to non-governmental research for the unification, standardization and broadening of international scientific management methodologies for governance (by the use of applied systems analysis). In the 1970’s, the IIASA launched cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), at that time already widely known as a clearing house for radiation monitoring and energy policy analysis. The objective the IIASA-IAEA cooperation focused on the making of experimental computer models as to develop scenarios of future energy planning and management. Key methodology focused on the coupling of economic development models with analyses of environmental pollution and risk assessment. The indicators of planning and management became prominent during the attempt to govern debates about the use of nuclear energy, power plant siting or the development of coal production amidst the 1970's. The joint project was supported on the highest political level, including the director general from the IAEA, the director of US Atomic Energy Commission, the FRG government, the Max Planck Society of the FRG, among many others. Well before the 1980’s the IAEA-IIASA Joint Project disseminated knowledge within an international and interdisciplinary setting. Research included input from psychologists, radiation experts, social scientists, and promoted the making of clear guidelines for governance, as for example for nuclear energy use in the FRG, Austria, the US, France, Sweden and the USSR. Revisiting the case study of the joint cooperation between the IAEA and the IIASA will discuss how the institute's systems approach contributed an innovative international logistics of knowledge exchange for energy policy making during the Cold War. Guided by the predominant claim to control systems by rational and optimized analyses, they opened pathways for further methodological approaches of policy analysis and social and economic planning within an international arena.