Abstract
Sustainability science strives to hone our ability to tackle problems that involve interconnected economic, social, and environmental systems. Addressing the root causes of these problems requires a more nuanced understanding of how human behaviour can undermine stakeholder engagement efforts towards effective conflict management and resolution. Participatory modelling—the co-production of knowledge via facilitated modelling workshops—plays a critical role in this endeavour by enabling participants to co-formulate problems and use modelling practices that aid in the description, solution, and decision-making actions of the group. While the difficulties of modelling with stakeholders are widely acknowledged, there is still a need to more concretely identify and categorize the barriers and opportunities that human behaviour presents to this type of engagement process. This review fills an important gap in participatory modelling practice by presenting five broad categories of barriers, along with strategies that can assist in overcoming them. We conclude with a series of actions and future research directions that the participatory modelling community as a whole can take to create more meaningful and behaviourally-attuned engagements that help stakeholders take concrete steps towards sustainability in natural resource management.
Highlights
Tackling Wicked Problems of SES with Participatory Modelling Addressing the social-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene requires a more nuanced understanding of the way humans perceive conflict and how people’s knowledge, motivations and behaviours can get in the way of collaboration and the implementation of corrective actions in the face of complexity [1]
Luna-Reyes et al identified ‘cognitive boundaries’ as a challenge, while pointing out “there is no agreed-upon process for bridging these boundaries” or clarity on what or how to communicate with stakeholders past these issues [26]. These and other studies revealed how human behaviour poses substantive challenges to the sort of transformational and systemic change sought by participatory modelling (PM) practitioners [32,49]
The issue of subjectivity applies to both stakeholders and to researchers, as both contribute to the modelling process based on their personal, biased, and subjective point of view
Summary
Tackling Wicked Problems of SES with Participatory Modelling Addressing the social-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene requires a more nuanced understanding of the way humans perceive conflict and how people’s knowledge, motivations and behaviours can get in the way of collaboration and the implementation of corrective actions in the face of complexity [1]. PM offers a systematic way to grapple with the complexity of SES issues by engaging stakeholders of a given problem to find a shared understanding and to implement collaborative solutions informed by science [32] It is this ‘shared understanding’ that is so vital to the success of any PM effort, as a common understanding of definitions, the components, and relationships of a system, as well as empathy and appreciation for the perspectives of different stakeholders can create benefits long after the modelling exercise ends [33]. The model becomes a ‘boundary object’, defined as a device that, if successfully implemented, can act as a bridge between various groups “to facilitate mutual understanding and cooperation” [26,36,41] by making people’s perceptions and worldviews, i.e., mental models, explicit These (often visual) objects help represent the connections between the people involved in the conversation, move us toward a more concrete representation of abstract concepts, and can be changed by proposals from any stakeholder [26].
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