Modelling Intervention Strategies for Cooperative Environmental Management

Central to sustainable natural resource management is the achievement of cooperation and collective action amongst stakeholders with initially conflicting short and long-term goals. It is argued that automatically generated agent-based computer models may be used to explore the ways in which external intervention can bring about effective stakeholder cooperation in environmental resource management contexts. The potential advantages of the agent-based modelling approach in this context include objectivity, and the discovery of currently unrecognised intervention strategies of practical value. An experimental procedure is proposed, and, by reference to a detailed design for a class of agent-based models, the technical obstacles that must be surmounted before this potential can be realised are examined. They include combinatorial complexity, and difficulty in the interpretation of a model’s behaviour in human social terms.