Agent-Based Simulation of Land Use Governance (ABSOLUG) in Tropical Commodity Frontiers

After conceptually analyzing jurisdictional approaches and other governance approaches in the first study, the logical next question was to address the question: do they work in practice? Or rather, do they work better than conventional governance approaches? Because if they don't, why bother? But, assessing the effectiveness of such approaches is difficult. They operate on long time scales, often 20 years or longer, which makes it tricky to say whether they're successful, especially if they haven't completed their full lifecycle. Experiments are difficult or unethical to carry out (e.g., who do you decides gets the treatment, and who doesn't?). Faced with these challenges, we started thinking about alternative research approaches and soon landed on modeling, more specifically, agent-based modeling. And since there was not really a model available that would allow us to do the type of simulation we were interested in, we decided to develop our own model. A full description of which you can see below.