Abstract The increasing importance of public policymaking with respect to energy and the environment is evident. Thus the processes of policy development and its relationship to environmental research have become more important to the research community. Since it appears that future policy will become more dependent on research results and hence strengthening this relationship, it seems appropriate to focus attention on research methodologies that provide preliminary results with respect to alternative policies. These results may precede expensive computer simulations which are often developed to aid in the understanding of environmental problems. In particular, it would seem that signed digraphs offer an approach which is simple in concept, qualitative in nature and yet provides a representation for problems in a framework which makes it easy to envision an array of potential alternative environmental policy directions which can then be investigated further by more sophisticated methods.