Verhagen, H., Borit, M., Bravo, G. and Wijermans, N., 2020. Advances in Social Simulation.

Since the first larger scale conferences in the early 1990s, social simulation has rapidly evolved into becoming a methodology known by researchers and practitioners in different areas including sociology, political science, economics, history, and ecology, to name a few. Each of these disciplines has to address what sociologists call the micro-macro link – how individual decision-making entities interact to produce effects at...

Wijermans, N. and O’Neill, E.D., 2020. Towards Modelling Interventions in Small-Scale Fisheries. In Advances in Social Simulation (pp. 485-489). Springer, Cham.

Interventions often have unintended effects, particularly when they target outcomes in complex social-ecological systems (SES), such as fisheries. Development agencies strive for ‘doing development differently’, because past efforts have often been unsuccessful. The question then is how to do better. Science can make a major contribution here. Its power lies in synthesising and generalising knowledge embedded in ‘thinking tool...

Wijermans, N., W. J. Boonstra, K. Orach, J. Hentati-Sundberg, and M. Schlüter. 2020. Behavioural diversity in fishing—Towards a next generation of fishery models. Fish and Fisheries 00:1–19.

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 integ...

Lindkvist, E., Wijermans, N., Daw, T.M., Gonzalez-Mon, B., et.al. 2020. Navigating Complexities: Agent-Based Modeling to Support Research, Governance, and Management in Small-Scale Fisheries. Front. Mar. Sci., 17 January 2020, https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2019.00733

The sustainable governance and management of small-scale fisheries (SSF) is challenging, largely due to their dynamic and complex nature. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a computational modeling approach that can account for the dynamism and complexity in SSF by modeling entities as individual agents with different characteristics and behavior, and simulate how their interactions can give rise to emergent phenomena, such as over...