Search

Metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate our own cognitive processes, confers advantages to individuals and their own judgment. A more recent hypothesis, however, states that explicit metacognition may also enhance the collective judgment of groups, and may enhance human collaboration and coordination. Here, we investigate this social function hypothesis of metacognition with arguably one of the oldest collaboration problems humans face, common‐pool resource use. Using an agent‐based model that simulates repeated group interactions and the forming of collective judgments about resource extraction, we show that (1) in "kind" environments (where confidence and judgment accuracy correlate positively), explicit metacognition may allow groups to reach more accurate judgments compared to groups exchanging object‐level information only; while (2) in "wicked" environments (where confidence and judgment accuracy correlate negatively), explicit metacognition may protect groups from the large judgment errors yielded by groups using metacognitive information for individual‐level learning only (implicit metacognition). With explicit metacognition, this research highlights a novel mechanism which, among others, provides a testable explanation of the often‐observed finding that groups all over the world communicate to enhance common property use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite improved knowledge and stricter regulations, numerous fish stocks remain overharvested. Previous research has shown that fisheries management may fail when the models and assessments used to inform management are based on unrealistic assumptions regarding fishers' decision‐making and responses to policies. Improving the understanding of fisher behaviour requires addressing its diversity and complexity through the integration of social science knowledge into modelling. In our paper, we review and synthesize state‐of‐the‐art research on both social science's understanding of fisher behaviour and the representation of fisher decision‐making in scientific models. We then develop and experiment with an agent‐based social–ecological fisheries model that formalizes three different fishing styles. Thereby we reflect on the implications of our incorporation of behavioural diversity and contrast it with the predominant assumption in fishery models: fishing practices being driven by rational profit maximizing. We envision a next generation of fisheries models and management that account for social scientific knowledge on individual and collective human behaviours. Through our agent‐based model, we demonstrate how such an integration is possible and propose a scientific approach for reducing uncertainty based on human behavioural diversity in fisheries. This study serves to lay the foundations for a next generation of social–ecological fishery models that account for human behavioural diversity and social and ecological complexity that are relevant for a realistic assessment and management of fishery sustainability problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of People & Nature is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article provides an evidence-based and policy-relevant contribution to understanding the phenomenon of policy learning and its structural constraints in the field of river basin management, in particular related to coping with current and future climatic hazards such as floods and droughts. This has been done by a formal comparative analysis of eight water management regimes, by using multi-value qualitative comparative analysis, focusing on the relationship between regime characteristics (as explanatory variables) and different levels of policy learning (as output value). This research has revealed the importance of the socio-cognitive dimension, as an essential emerging property of complex adaptive governance systems. This socio-cognitive dimension depends on a specific set of structural conditions; in particular, better integrated cooperation structures in combination with advanced information management are the key factors leading towards higher levels of policy learning. Furthermore, this research highlights a number of significant positive correlations between different regime elements, thereby identifying a stabilizing mechanism in current management regimes, and this research also highlights the necessity of fine-tuning centralized control with bottom-up approaches. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key elements of the rapidly expanding field of ecosystem-based management include: (a) understanding connections among social and ecological systems and (b) developing analytical approaches to inform the necessary trade-offs among ecosystem services and human activities in coastal and marine areas. To address these needs, we investigate the impacts of multiple economic sectors on the marine ecosystem and dependent human community in the Gulf of California with an ecological-economic model. We focus on the spotted rose snapper ( Lutjanus guttatus), an economically important species targeted concurrently by the nearshore artisanal fleet, the sportfishing fleet, and by the industrial shrimp fleet as bycatch. Economic returns to the local community are driven by the artisanal fishery catch and the number of tourists who engage in the sportsfishery, and these variables are in turn impacted by fish abundance. We find that the coexistence of the two sectors (and production of both seafood and tourism services) creates stability in key elements of the coupled systems. When the coupled systems are perturbed by changes in exploitation and climate variability, the artisanal fishery responds more rapidly and to a greater degree than the sportsfishery to shifts in the fish population. Our results suggest that vital components of coupled systems may well respond differently to climate variability or other perturbations, and that management strategies should be developed with this in mind. Models like ours can facilitate the development and testing of hypotheses about the form and strength of interactions between ecosystems, services, and the human communities that rely on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing trade-offs among water uses in a river basin to sustain multiple ecosystem services is crucial for adaptation to changing river flow regimes. Here we analyze the trade-off between irrigation and fisheries in the Amudarya, a semi-arid river basin in Central Asia, using an optimal control and an agent-based modeling approach. With the optimal control approach (OCA), we identify the economic and ecological conditions for water sharing in a regime where a social manager controls water withdrawals and fish harvesting. With the agent-based model (ABM), we relax some of the assumptions of the OCA to investigate how localized, individual agents with varied water use histories adapt their water use activities to local resource conditions. Variation in the farmers’ initial labor allocations to the two activities results in regimes with only one activity or both. Global returns and income equality are highest in a mixed regime. The mixed regimes also are more robust to water variability because fishing activities can compensate for decreased agricultural performance in the midstream regions. Thus, allowing for multiple uses can improve the coupled social-ecological system’s performance and its resilience. We also observe a lock-in effect similar to the current situation in the Amudarya, where agriculture is the dominant water use and transition to a more balanced allocation has proven to be extremely difficult. As in the ABM, this can to some extent be attributed to the difficulties of achieving sufficient revenues from fishing when agricultural activities upstream are high. Regulations or incentives are needed to overcome those barriers, and to facilitate progress towards integrated water management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]