However, it is especially ironic that they seem to have felt no need to apply insights from their extremely valuable ecological thinking to new understanding of their own policy processes. Any policy forum constitutes a social system. Such a social system can be likened to an ecosystem with a range of interacting species. Each policy faction can be perceived as a species with varying numbers of members. Such relationships may effectively vary over time.
Predation only takes place when the predator needs to eat.
Species are woven together in food chains. An endangered species is an important indicator of dangers to the ecosystem as a whole. This level of perception does not help to understand the dynamics of the ecosystem of policies. At the ecosystemic level the issue is whether the numbers and dynamics of the species are destabilizing the ecosystem irreversibly and in what way. This suggests that the predominance of any particular policy might have disastrous consequences.