Participatory Approaches to Modelling for Improved Learning and Decision‐making in Natural Resource Governance: an Editorial

Abstract

P ARTICIPATORY PROCESSES PLAY AN INCREASINGLY SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN NATURAL RESOURCE GOVERNANCE (Rauschmayer et al., 2009; Dietz and Stern, 2008; Stoll-Kleemann and Welp, 2006). Given such typical challenges as high levels of uncertainty about resources and their use, deep conflicts among stakeholders or serious deficits in rule implementation, the development of innovative ways of including stakeholders in managing resources such as fish stocks, forests or river basins continues to be an important field of research. Closer attention has been paid in the past decade in Europe and across the world to ways of opening up the field of modelling to stakeholder involvement (Hare et al., 2003; Ritzema et al., 2010; and Webler et al.). For a long time, this field had been considered an exclusive domain of ‘experts’ in formal representations of natural resources and their utilization. The increased attention to the potential that combining modelling techniques with participatory procedures may hold for improving or guiding natural resource governance needs to be seen against the background of the growing importance of models as tools for informing policies on the management of natural resources. In several areas of natural resource management, such as fisheries management or water quality management, the trend in the past decades has been to base management decisions to a greater extent on analytical attempts to model sequential, functional or even causal relationships between human interventions and natural responses. Moreover, in the modelling research community there is currently a trend towards producing ever more large and complex computer-based models. These highly complex models should not be seen as products of overambitious computer programmers. They are typically a response to demands from policy-makers and stakeholders to carry out more integrated assessments and to better account for uncertainties (Jakeman and Letcher, 2003; Refsgaard et al., 2005; Motos and Wilson, 2006). The continuing proliferation of what has been called ‘models for policy’ (Webler et al., pointing out the contrast with ‘models for science’) has stimulated a wider discussion of what could be appropriate ways to use such models in the governance process. One question central to this discussion is the possible role that stakeholders can play in model-supported resource governance. Against this backdrop, we organized an international expert workshop on ‘Participatory Modelling in Natural Resource Governance’ which took place in June 2009 in Haigerloch, Germany. The workshop was carried out within the FP7 research project JAKFISH (short for Judgement And Knowledge in Fisheries Including StakeHolders, 2008–2011; Pastoors et al., 2010). Its main objective was to collect experiences with using participatory modelling techniques in other areas of natural resource management and to build on them in the project’s attempt to develop and test such techniques in the field of fisheries (Dreyer and Renn, 2009). The papers in this special issue of Environmental Policy and Governance are drawn from this workshop.