Does Everyone's Opinion Carry Equal Weight?
On Anti-Scam Policy, Game Dynamics, and the Inescapability of Roles in Governance
In aerial yoga, the moment of highest injury risk comes not from complexity but from transition—when the center of gravity shifts, the anchor point wavers, and the suspension angles falter. The entire system begins to twist, pull, and if poorly caught, descend into freefall. Aerial yoga is not merely about movement—it is the art of distributing force, transferring risk, and sustaining grace in suspension without collapse.
So it is with public policy. I’ve previously discussed Nash equilibrium and the common practice of stakeholder analysis among policy professionals. Often, we see quadrant diagrams plotting platforms, governments, businesses, and users onto influence matrices. But in real governance, stakeholders do not exist on a flat plane—they are suspended in a multidimensional web. The key question is not "who speaks" but "whose failure to act will cause the structure to collapse."
The most frequent error is misjudging stakeholder relevance: misidentifying who bears the true weight of responsibility, and whose actions—or inaction—will trigger systemic failure.
In anti-scam policy, platforms are asked to proactively detect threats, banks to block transactions, telecoms to share information—yet no actor is institutionally designated with the role of “inaction equals noncompliance.” This pattern is not unique to scams, nor to Taiwan. In energy transitions, local governments are drawn into procedural consultation without being authorized for risk-bearing decisions. In vaccine distribution, central coordination overrides local accountability without cross-level game alignment.
I. Governance Is Not a Matrix—It Is a Field of Suspended Tensions
In my own approach to stakeholder analysis, I classify actors along two axes: influence and attentiveness. High-attention/high-influence actors require deep collaboration; low-attention/low-influence ones may be sidelined. Yet this framework often fails when institutional intuition is off—when one cannot perceive where true structural influence lies.
Take anti-scam governance as an example. Much like disinformation, the ultimate defense lies in the public's own awareness. Still:
- Platforms are seen as highly influential, yet often act only when reputationally pressured, hence placed in the "high influence, low attentiveness" quadrant.
- Financial institutions, operating at the endpoint of fraud detection, tend to act conservatively due to compliance risks.
- Telecoms, while seemingly neutral, control data nodes key to tracing scams, and are treated as passive conduits.
- Government agencies are seen as attentive due to political accountability and system oversight.
- Civil society and NGOs are often labeled as “participants,” yet rarely hold structural weight.
This diagram may look tidy but explains nothing about why each actor must act. It is a static map in a dynamic game.
Once governance enters game-theoretic dynamics—where actors anticipate each other's moves, assess risk exposure, and respond accordingly—any system without defined points of sanction, incentive, or inescapability collapses into a non-cooperative equilibrium. No one moves because no one is protected. Everyone waits because waiting is safest.
A good stakeholder analysis must go beyond mapping roles—it must identify who cannot be displaced, who acts as the anchor line that, if severed, brings the whole governance fabric down.
II. When Inaction Becomes the Rational Strategy
— Game-Theoretic Stalemates in Anti-Scam, Vaccine, and Energy Policy
In polycentric governance, inaction is not always negligence or blame-shifting. More often, it is the rational outcome of systems that incentivize silence. This form of strategic passivity is a well-known but fatal feature in game theory—systemically stable, yet operationally paralyzed. Three patterns illustrate this trap:
1. Information Asymmetry with Unbalanced Accountability:
In scam governance, platforms hold user data, behavioral signals, and reporting capabilities. But the risk is theirs alone. Over-filtering or false positives lead to lawsuits or user backlash. Hence, platforms often hesitate—not out of apathy, but due to poorly shielded exposure. The system teaches them to stay still.
2. Multilevel Governance with Broken Risk Channels:
During vaccine rollouts, central governments controlled pacing and logistics, but frontline local governments bore the brunt of public outcry and execution risks. If the system cannot allow local stress to feed back and be rebalanced, tension skews: decision-making power becomes detached from burden-bearing, and implementers are left voiceless.
3. Public Goods with Local Resistance:
In energy transitions, central policies may promote renewables, but without structured feedback, incentives, or intermediary mechanisms, local governments and residents become the frontlines of protest. Grid access may be a national imperative, but if local risk and decision overlap are not managed, resistance becomes the most logical response.
If systems fail to create stabilizing incentives—letting actors know their efforts will be supported and not left unreciprocated—then governance ceases to be negotiated and becomes paralysed. Everyone waits for someone else to act, until the system breaks under its own indecision.
III. “Who Cannot Exit Without Collapse”
— Identifying Irreplaceable Structural Roles
Effective stakeholder analysis is not about participation; it's about structural indispensability. It should not ask “who should be invited,” but “who, if absent, causes structural collapse.”
In advanced aerial yoga, not everyone performs the same pose. Certain individuals must at specific moments become part of the fabric—extensions of the cloth itself. In governance, the same applies: critical actors may not be visible, but must be precisely anchored. Otherwise, even the most graceful configuration may fall apart upon the next shift of weight.
Not every actor must be empowered. But those who cannot be replaced must not be allowed to exit. This is not a question of inclusion, but of necessity. The system must not merely allow them to participate—it must require them to, and disallow silence.
This is not a negotiation about participation—it is a design of non-exit. A structural composition in which specific roles cannot be abdicated.
Aerial yoga is not only aesthetics—it is physics. Geometry. The same holds for governance. Policy is not about mobilizing everyone. It is about identifying those who must not let go—and building around their grip.
In anti-scam policy, platforms must detect, banks must alert, civil society must sense and amplify. Otherwise, scam signals will always seep through. In vaccine policy, if frontline medical doubts go unrecognized, national declarations cannot lift public confidence. In energy policy, if local trust is missing, no vision can land on the ground.
In sum, multi-stakeholder governance must ensure accurate inclusion, and correct weighting. If policy design fails to see this, it will never produce a structure that can hold.
IV. Not Consensus Allocation, but Accountability Anchoring
Governance is not short of opinions. Nor must everyone hold an equal voice. What it needs is clarity: Whose action (or inaction) will destabilize the whole?
Therefore, the core lesson here is not "how to include everyone"—but how to design systems where critical actors cannot opt out, and when they do act, the system catches them.
This is not inclusion for its own sake. It is structural physics. It is the tension of governance made visible.
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