Participatory and Cross-Scale Modelling of Social-Ecological Systems

We require better understanding of what society wants and needs from the natural environment and the impacts these have on it, how the environment shapes peoples’ and societies’ behaviour, and how public policies might navigate trade-offs and synergies in social-ecological systems (SESs) across different spatial and temporal scales. Agent-based modelling aims at addressing these needs but often does not consider interactions across varied spatial and temporal scales, which have large potential impacts on results and associated policy design. In complex SESs where certainty is low, data availability is limited, and management of resources is contested, ongoing, and adaptive, using participatory procedures for including a wide array of stakeholders in modelling efforts is central to their effectiveness and value. The important and diverse roles models can play in guiding decision processes, surfacing assumptions and disagreement, identifying unexpected second-order effects, disseminating and increasing societal knowledge are a feature of stakeholder processes today. In many cases participation remains tagged on haphazardly during the modelling process, or is merely paid false lip service.

Workshop aims and objectives

This workshop aims to push for new, bold, and ambitious modelling breaking down barriers between agent- and none agent-based modellers, SES scholars, and policy users, unblocking theoretical and methodological roadblocks for cross-scale and participatory modelling of SESs. During the Lorentz workshop, we aim to address the following questions:

How can we truly model SESs across multiple temporal and spatial scales and dimensions (e.g. social, economic, political)?

What might the characteristics of complex systems (e.g. emergent, self-organising, feedback loops, adaptation, non-linearity) look like and create across scales? How might we represent and study these concepts in cross-scale agent-based models?