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Agricultural research is expected to foster agro-ecological transitions. For that purpose, methodologies of participative integrated assessment of new farming and cropping systems are requested. However, the territory level and the stakeholders’ participation are often not sufficiently embraced. Based on the companion modeling approach, a group of researchers from different disciplines experimented an approach where researchers and stakeholders collaborated intensively all along the process of design and use of the model. The researchers selected a small rural area where agriculture plays a major role (Valensole plateau, south of France) and where they had not carried out any investigation before. In such conditions, we argue that the interactions between researchers and stakeholders involved in the co-design from scratch of a simulation model stimulate a collective reflection about the sustainability of current and alternative farming systems. This article describes the different phases of the process from stakeholders’ enrolment until the final discussion of the results provided by the model. It underlines the conditions that favored the emergence of consensus and the production of a new set of knowledge. It emphasizes how the discordances between data and disagreements between stakeholders were used to stimulate collective debates and underlines the role played by the model. Finally, the article discusses the drawbacks that the approach did not overcome.

Abstract Calling on the concept of environmental justice in its distributive, procedural and recognition dimensions, we implemented a coelaborative scenario building approach to explore sustainable livelihoods pathways in four sites belonging to two Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa. Grounded on participation and transdisciplinarity, as a foundation for decolonised anticipatory action research, we aimed at stimulating knowledge exchange and providing insights on the future of local livelihoods engaging experts living within these TFCAs. Our results show that wildlife and wildlife‐related activities are not seen as the primary drivers of local livelihoods, despite the focus and investments of dominant stakeholders in these sectors. Instead, local governance and land use regulations emerged as key drivers in the four study sites. The state of natural resources, including water, and appropriate farming systems also appeared critical to sustain future livelihoods in TFCAs, together with the recognition of indigenous culture, knowledge and value systems. Nature conservation, especially in Africa, is rooted in its colonial past and struggles to free or decolonise itself from the habits of this past despite decades of reconsideration. To date, the enduring coloniality of conservation prevents local citizens from truly participating in the planning and designing of the TFCAs they live in, leaving room for limited benefits to local citizens and often limiting Indigenous people's capacity to conserve. A practical way forward is to consider environmental justice as a cement between the two pillars of the TFCA concept, that is, nature conservation and socio‐economic development of local or neighbouring communities, as part of a more broadly and urgent need to rethink the relationships between people in, and with, the rest of nature. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

The contribution of overgrazing to high-elevation rangeland degradation is a problem across the Himalayan region, and it leads to tensions among users. In the alpine areas of eastern Bhutan, 2 communities of settled and seminomadic herders have been engaged in enduring open conflict over access to a large natural pasture. To reestablish a communication channel between these communities, a participatory modeling and simulation process was implemented with the concerned stakeholders. A training workshop on this collaborative approach and its key tools, particularly computer-assisted role-playing games, was attended by research and extension officers and was immediately followed by a field workshop attended by 6 herders from each community. The participants used their empirical knowledge to improve the relevance of the spatial distribution of the land degradation problem on the proposed game board. They also established a link between the features and rules of the role-playing game and the actual circumstances of the rangeland. The gaming sessions allowed the participants to share their respective viewpoints on the land degradation process in a nonthreatening environment. The assessment of the field workshop identified multiple effects regarding awareness of the problem, participants' confidence, colearning, and mutual trust. This intervention enabled the emergence of social capital ahead of the preparation of major development-oriented interventions in the watershed. This study demonstrates the pertinence of using simple but relevant abstract models, codesigned with their users, to mitigate tensions between parties in conflict over the use of renewable natural resources.

Deforestation and biodiversity loss in agroecosystems are generally the result of rational choices, not of a lack of awareness or knowledge. Despite both scientific evidence and traditional knowledge that supports the value of diverse production systems for ecosystem services and resilience, a trend of agroecosystem intensification is apparent across tropical regions. These transitions happen in spite of policies that prohibit such transformations. We present a participatory modelling study run to (1) understand the drivers of landscape transition and (2) explore the livelihood and environmental impacts of tenure changes in the coffee agroforestry systems of Kodagu (India). The components of the system, key actors and resources, and their interactions were defined with stakeholders, following the companion modelling (ComMod) approach. The underlying ecological processes driving the system were validated through expert knowledge and scientific literature. The conceptual model was transformed into a role-playing game and validated by eight workshops with a total of 57 participants. Two scenarios were explored, a No Policy Change as baseline, and a Restitution of Rights where rights to cut the native trees are handed over to farmers. Our results suggest that the landscape transition is likely to continue unabated unless there is a change to the current policy framework. However, the Restitution of Rights risks speeding up the process rather than reversing it, as inter alia, the differential growth rate between exotic and native tree species, kick in.

This paper is a reflexive analysis of a three-year participatory water research project conducted in the Upper East Region (UER) of Ghana, whose explicit objective was to initiate a multi-level dialogue to support the national Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) policy framework. The transdisciplinary team adopted the Companion Modeling approach (ComMod), using role-playing games and a computerized agent-based model to support the identification of a problemshed centered on issues of river bank cultivation, erosion, and flooding, and initiate a multi-level dialogue on ways that this problemshed could be tackled. On the basis of this experience, we identify three key criteria for transdisciplinary research to support innovative water governance: (1) the iterative adaptation of tools and facilitation techniques based on feedback from participants; (2) a common understanding of the objectives pursued and the approach used among researchers, who need to explicit their posture, and crucially; (3) the co-identification of a problemshed that diverse stakeholders are interested in tackling. Finally, we argue that the context in which research is funded and conducted in the development sector constitutes a challenge for researchers to be “participants like any other” in the projects they coordinate, which constitutes a barrier to true transdisciplinarity.

Protected areas are often burdened with conflicts between environmental managers and neighboring rural communities. Unsuccessful top-down approaches for conservation may be replaced by alternative forms of systemic management involving local actors in the design and implementation of conservation management. Although theoretically sound and appealing, the involvement of local residents in the management of protected areas is often impaired in practice by scale mismatches, conflicting values and interests, power imbalance, and a lack of trust among actors. In this paper, we describe a process initiated in Zimbabwe to create a fair and balanced locally designed arena where local communities and protected area managers may collaborate to produce effective management plans. Adopting the Companion Modeling approach, we conducted a participatory modeling experiment to codesign a role-playing game that simulates the interactions between farming activities, livestock herding practices, and wildlife in a virtual landscape reproducing local social-ecological dynamics. After 18 months of intensive ethnographical fieldwork to gain knowledge and legitimacy, we spent one year codesigning the first version of the game with a group of volunteer villagers. The game, called Kulayijana (teaching each other), was tested and validated by other members of the rural communities and subsequently presented to protected area managers. We show how this approach allowed the negotiation of uncertainties and their inclusion in a model that constitutes a shared representation of farmers' interactions with the protected area. We emphasize the fact that working with marginalized actors first increased participation, appropriation, and confidence of rural communities to engage in a multistakeholder debate, thus reducing power imbalance among actors. We conclude by discussing the next phase of our work: the necessary involvement of conservation actors in the Kulayijana team, and the implementation of Kulayijana with higher hierarchical levels.

Biosphere reserves are an example of social-ecological systems that combine biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic development with knowledge generation and dissemination (both scientific and local). We review lessons learned from case studies biosphere reserves in western African and France, highlighting the importance of early stakeholder engagement to build knowledge for achieving sustainable development. We discuss the evolution of the concept of biosphere reserves and its application over time in different socioeconomic and cultural settings. The diversity of stakeholders and their different needs and perceptions about nature conservation complicate implementation processes, sometimes resulting in conflicts about the objectives and zonation of biosphere reserves. Dialogue among the different stakeholders must start at an early planning phase and be based on the principle of social and ecological solidarity. Dialogue must then be pursued, formalized, ritualized, and translated both in terms of biosphere reserve management and in terms of political support. Tools and methods exist that can facilitate such dialogue and colearning.

Mâu thuẫn về nhu cầu nước, nghèo đói tiềm tàng kết hợp với phân hóa kinh tế, mặn hóa là 3 tác động do canh tác lúa-tôm gây ra tại tỉnh duyên hải Bạc Liêu thuộc đồng bằng sông Cửu Long (ĐBSCL), Việt Nam. Phương pháp mới tạm dịch là Mô hình đa tác nhân được sử dụng để lượng hóa 3 tác động nói trên. Lần lượt hai kỳ trò chơi phân vai và Mô hình Lúa-Tôm trên cơ sở tác nhân (RiceShrimpMD ABM ? Agent-Based Model) trong phương pháp mô hình đa tác nhân đã được thực hiện giữa nhà nghiên cứu và các nhóm người liên quan trong các năm 2006-2009. Các bài học rút ra từ trò chơi phân vai và 5 năm trong mô phỏng đã cho thấy rằng: mâu thuẫn về nhu cầu nước xảy ra khi cả lúa và tôm đều được canh tác sau tháng 9 vốn là thời điểm thích hợp khuyến cáo cho sản xuất lúa. ở vùng hạ lưu nơi gần nguồn nước mặn, mâu thuẫn tiềm tàng nhiều hơn trong tình huống nước mặn cao hơn 5 phần ngàn được cung cấp vào tháng 12 trong khi người sản xuất không lưu tâm đến điều kiện môi trường. Nghèo đói tiềm tàng và phân hóa kinh tế xảy ra khi lúa ít được quan tâm canh tác trong hệ thống lúa-tôm, đặc biệt ở vùng hạ lưu; tác động mặn hóa kết hợp với hạn hán được đo lường thông qua năng suất lúa và cho thấy rằng năng suất lúa có giảm đi so với điều kiện bình thường. Tuy nhiên, sản lượng lúa giảm sút do mặn và hạn hán có thể được tránh khỏi khi lúa trong hệ thống lúa-tôm được canh tác hàng năm. Lúa trong hệ thống canh tác lúa-tôm là một nguồn thu nhập làm giảm mức độ rủi ro và phân hóa kinh tế tiềm tàng. Nghiên cứu này nhận thấy rằng, phương pháp mô hình đa tác nhân là một kỹ thuật mới thích hợp cho các nhóm người liên quan có cơ hội chia sẻ kiến thức, quan điểm và hợp tác trong quản lý điều hành cung cấp nước cho sản xuất bền vững.

Two case studies are presented in which models were used as focal tools in problems associated with common-pool resource management in developing countries. In the first case study, based in Zimbabwe, Bayesian or Belief Networks were used in a project designed to enhance the adaptive management capacity of a community in a semiarid rangeland system. In the second case study, based in Senegal, multi-agent systems models were used in the context of role plays to communicate research findings to a community, as well as to explore policies for improved management of rangelands and arable lands over which herders and farmers were in conflict. The paper provides examples of the use of computer-based modeling with stakeholders who had limited experience with computer systems and numerical analyses. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the major lessons learned from the two independent case studies. Perhaps the most important lesson was the development of a common understanding of a problem through the development of the models with key stakeholders. A second key lesson was the need for research to be adaptive if it were to benefit adaptive managers. Both case study situations required significant changes in project orientation as stakeholder needs were defined. Both case studies recognized the key role that research, and particularly the development of models, played in bring different actors together to formulate improved management strategies or policies. Participatory engagement with stakeholders is a time-consuming and relatively costly process in which, in the case studies, most of the costs were born by the research projects themselves. We raise the concern that these activities may not be widely replicable if such costs are not reduced or born by the stakeholders themselves.