Participatory research methods are increasingly used to collectively understand complex social-environmental problems and to design solutions through diverse and inclusive stakeholder engagement. But participatory research rarely engages stakeholders to co-develop and co-interpret models that conceptualize and quantify system dynamics for comparing scenarios of alternate action. Even fewer participatory projects have engaged people using geospatial simulations of dynamic landscape processes and spatially explicit planning scenarios. We contend that geospatial participatory modeling (GPM) can confer multiple benefits over non-spatial approaches for participatory research processes, by (a) personalizing connections to problems and their solutions through visualizations of place, (b) resolving abstract notions of landscape connectivity, and (c) clarifying the spatial scales of drivers, data, and decision-making authority. We illustrate through a case study how GPM is bringing stakeholders together to balance population growth and conservation in a coastal region facing dramatic landscape change due to urbanization and sea level rise. We find that an adaptive, iterative process of model development, sharing, and revision drive innovation of methods and ultimately improve the realism of land change models. This co-production of knowledge enables all participants to fully understand problems, evaluate the acceptability of trade-offs, and build buy-in for management actions in the places where they live and work.
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Participatory Modeling: A Methodology for Engaging Stakeholder Knowledge and Participation in Social Science Research
Participatory modeling (PM) is an engaged research methodology for creating analog or computer-based models of complex systems, such as socio–environmental systems. Used across a range of fields, PM centers stakeholder knowledge and participation to create more internally valid models that can inform policy and increase engagement and trust between communities and research teams. The PM process also presents opportunities for knowledge co-production and eliciting cross-sectional and longitudinal data on stakeholders’ worldviews and knowledge, risk assessment, decision-making, and social learning. We present an overview of the stages for PM and how it can be used for community-based, stakeholder-engaged social science research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2017491
- PAR ID:
- 10347971
- Publisher / Repository:
- Field Methods
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Field Methods
- ISSN:
- 1525-822X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1525822X2210769
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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