Sunday, August 3, 2008: 9:00 AM-4:30 PM
203 B, Midwest Airlines Center
WK 11 - An Educational Simulation Tool for Negotiating Sustainable Natural Resource Management Strategies Among Social Actors with Conflicting Interests
Biotic communities subject to productive transformation - and social relations among stakeholders involved in their management - are complex, nonlinear, adaptive processes. The inner workings and potential behaviors of such processes are not always easily grasped. It is important to help people understand the dynamic nature of sustainability attributes and to better address the issues, tradeoffs and conflicts associated with sustainable management of natural resources. In this workshop, participants will master the use of our free-ware tool called “Negotiated Design of Sustainable Production Systems among Social Agents with Conflicting Interests”, which will be provided during the session. The workshop unfolds as an interactive drama in three acts in which participants take on the roles of different social actors. They solve excercises and search for solutions (collectively and in couples) on the user-friendly and very graphic scenario simulators provided by the computer program. Results from 12 workshops held in Latin America, Europe, and Asia show that participants usually come up with creative solutions that meet the biodiversity conservation and rural livelihood interests of all stakeholders involved. Participants will better grasp the meaning of productivity, stability, resistance, resilience, reliability, adaptability, and equity. They will also understand concepts such as bi-stability, thresholds, risk, catastrophic shift, hysteresis, restoration, tradeoffs, and multicriteria analysis. Ultimately, they get an opportunity to become familiar with more creative and open-minded attitudes when defending interests and making collective decisions in a multi-stakeholder environment. The workshop has a duration of 7 hours (with breaks for coffee and lunch included). Participants should bring a laptop computer for every two people. It should have a web browser that has FLASH plugin previously installed. (Many browsers have the flash plugin out of the box. If not, you should download it for free before the workshop from www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer).
Organizer:	Luis E. García-Barrios, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur
Co-organizers:	Erika N. Speelman, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur Max Pimm, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur

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See more of The 93rd ESA Annual Meeting (August 3 -- August 8, 2008)