Abstract
Participatory modelling increases the transparency of environmental planning and management processes and enhances the mutual understanding among different parties. We present a sequential probabilistic approach to involve stakeholders' views in the formal decision support process. A continuous Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model is used to estimate population parameters for stakeholder groups, based on samples of individual value judgements. The approach allows quantification and visualization of the variability in views among and within stakeholder groups. Discrete BBN is populated with these parameters, to summarize and visualize the information and to link it to a larger decision analytic influence diagram (ID). As part of ID, the resulting discrete BBN element serves as a distribution-form decision criteria in probabilistic evaluation of alternative management strategies, to help find a solution that represents the optimal compromise in the presence of potentially conflicting objectives. We demonstrate our idea using example data from the field of marine spatial planning. However, this approach is applicable to many types of management cases. We suggest that by advancing the mutual understanding and concrete participation this approach can further facilitate the stakeholder involvement also during the various stages of the environmental management process.
Highlights
Human activities create pressures on ecosystems, upon which the societies rely at the same time (Allen et al, 2016)
We propose a sequential Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) approach (Korb and Nicholson, 2010) to analyse and acknowledge the uncertainty about the group mean as part of the Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA)
We have presented a sequential Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) approach as a potential method to operationalize stakeholder involvement in formal decision support
Summary
Human activities create pressures on ecosystems, upon which the societies rely at the same time (Allen et al, 2016). Ecosystem-based management (EBM) aims for operationalizing this systemic social-ecological thinking as it requires adaptive management that takes into account the dynamics within ecosystems and between the ecosystems and societies (Levin et al, 2009; Langhans et al, 2019). By increasing the transparency of the process and enhancing the mutual understanding among different parties, participatory modelling can accelerate the decision-making and increase the implementation success (Voinov and Bousquet, 2010; Voinov et al, 2016). Stakeholders have, for example, participated in recognizing cultural, social or recreational values associated to areas (Rees et al, 2010; Ruiz-Frau et al, 2011; Sherrouse et al, 2011; Kobryn et al, 2018) or identified areas where human uses and coastal habitats are in conflict (Tuda et al, 2014; Moore et al, 2017)
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