Towards Understanding Collective Resource Use: The Role of Individual Attribution of Ecological Change
Summary
Common pool resources, like fish, timber, water, are essential in providing food, income and raw material. However, maintaining sustainable practices for common pool resources is a collective challenge due to the social and ecological uncertainties. Climate impacts only further complicates the collective governance of these resources, as resource availability will substantially change and reduce. To understand how do resource users actually deal with these changes in resource availability is a central to our understanding the sustainable collective use of natural resources. From the few empirical studies available we learned that fishers make differently sense of ecological change, which should be taken into account when studying how collective resource use behaviour changes in dynamic social (what others may do) and ecological settings. Yet, very few studies of collective sustainable resource use, if any, investigate the role of heterogeneous attribution of ecological change mechanisms at the individual level for collective resource use. Our project thus seeks understanding of the role of how individual’s attribution of ecological change may influence sustainable collective resource use with agent-based modelling (ABM).
