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.