Wisdom of stakeholder crowds in complex social–ecological systems

Payam Aminpour (), Steven A. Gray, Antonie J. Jetter, Joshua E. Introne, Alison Singer and Robert Arlinghaus
Additional contact information
Payam Aminpour: Michigan State University
Steven A. Gray: Michigan State University
Antonie J. Jetter: Portland State University
Joshua E. Introne: Syracuse Univeristy
Alison Singer: Northern Arizona University
Robert Arlinghaus: Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries

Nature Sustainability, 2020, vol. 3, issue 3, 191-199

Abstract: Abstract Sustainable management of natural resources requires adequate scientific knowledge about complex relationships between human and natural systems. Such understanding is difficult to achieve in many contexts due to data scarcity and knowledge limitations. We explore the potential of harnessing the collective intelligence of resource stakeholders to overcome this challenge. Using a fisheries example, we show that by aggregating the system knowledge held by stakeholders through graphical mental models, a crowd of diverse resource users produces a system model of social–ecological relationships that is comparable to the best scientific understanding. We show that the averaged model from a crowd of diverse resource users outperforms those of more homogeneous groups. Importantly, however, we find that the averaged model from a larger sample of individuals can perform worse than one constructed from a smaller sample. However, when averaging mental models within stakeholder-specific subgroups and subsequently aggregating across subgroup models, the effect is reversed. Our work identifies an inexpensive, yet robust way to develop scientific understanding of complex social–ecological systems by leveraging the collective wisdom of non-scientist stakeholders.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0467-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natsus:v:3:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1038_s41893-019-0467-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/natsustain/

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0467-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Sustainability is currently edited by Monica Contestabile

More articles in Nature Sustainability from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().