Participatory Management of Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation and Social Inclusion

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to reflect on our experience in a serious game research project, named SimParc, about multi-agent support for participatory management of protected areas for biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. Our project has a clear filiation with the MAS-RPG methodology developed by the ComMod action-research community, where multi-agent simulation (MAS) computes the dynamics of the resources and role-playing game (RPG) represents the actions and dialogue between stakeholders about the resources. We have explored some specific directions, such as: dialogue support for negotiation; argumentation-based decision making and its explanation; technical assistance to the players based on viability modeling. In our project, multi-agent based simulation focuses on the negotiation process itself, performed by human players and some artificial participants/agents, rather than on the simulation of the resources dynamics. Meanwhile, we have also reintroduced the modeling of the socioecosystem dynamics, but as a local technical assistance/analysis tool for the players.