Resilience in rural common-pool resource management systems: towards enhancing landscape amenities using a multi-agent approach

Rural areas are continuously subject to changing circumstances, varying from changes in ecosystem conditions to socio-economic changes like food- and financial crises. Within Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform is driver as well for change of rural common pool resources (CPR). Rural CPRs are defined as rural social-ecological systems which provide landscapes with high agricultural, ecological and cultural-historical values. The conservation of these systems is treated as the enhancement of these values through the protection of rare plant species. Analyzing resilience of rural CPRs offers a framework to emphasize dynamics and interdependencies across time, space and between social, economic and ecological domains. This paper provides insight into the effects of CAP reforms on rural CPRs and its resilience, through the use of a multi-agent simulation approach. The advantage of such a multi-agent approach is that it allows to capture interactions of heterogeneous agents in a landscape that provides space for both agriculture and rare plant species. The simulation model is applied for Winterswijk, which is a rural region in eastern part of the Netherlands. This CPR is characterized by a small scale landscape with high biodiversity. Transferring insights from resilience thinking to rural development strategies would lead to a focus on the factors that build the ability of the rural area to respond to policy changes. The strength of multi-agent models is illustrated and their potential for the analysis of different policy options and implications in rural areas is shown

Exploring green agricultural policy scenarios with a spatially explicit agent-based model

This report presents an analysis of the impact of environmental cooperative decision-making for the European Commission’s legislative proposals for the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 2014-2020. The analysis is based on scenarios with a spatially explicit rural agent-based model (SERA) that explicitly models farmers, their socio-economic decision-making, their land use, and the landscape of which they are part. The first part of the analysis focuses on the effects of environmental cooperative collective decision-making for implementation of the ‘greening measure’ Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs). The second part of the analysis focuses on the interest of collective agri-environment measures. Results show that ways through which EFAs are allocated are crucial for effectiveness of cooperative approaches. Relying on simple market oriented governance structures will not by definition result in a better allocation of EFAs in a region. Results show that when the environmental cooperative is a key player in the designation and allocation of Pillar II agri-environment schemes, farmland biodiversity potentially increases because local expert knowledge on favorable ecological sites can be used for optimal allocation of the scheme

Verkennen en toepassen van besluitvormingsmodellen in de uitvoering van natuurbeleid

In dit werkdocument is een literatuurverkenning uitgevoerd van verschillende bestuurskundige analysemethoden en besluitvormingsmodellen. Daarnaast zijn twee casussen onderzocht om te verkennen of dergelijke casussen toepasbaar zijn om besluitvormingsmodellen in het natuurbeleid te simuleren. Uit de verkenningen is een prototype besluitvormingsmodel ontwikkeld en is de besluitvorming van een casus gesimuleerd. De voorlopige resultaten van deze simulaties geven aanleiding om het besluitvormingsmodel verder te ontwikkelen