The social-ecological complexity in managing a renewable resource: modelling the effect of persistently sustainable harvesters

Abstract

In today's increasingly human-influenced world, understanding the behaviour of human and natural systems as integrated social-ecological systems is vital to making responsible decisions. Ensuring that we harvest our shared natural resources sustainably is one of the crucial challenges of the Anthropocene. Mechanisms such as zealotry and learning via social contagion promote cooperative behaviour in game theoretic models of such social dilemmas, but their influence on the social-ecological dynamics of harvesting is unexplored. In this work, we investigate this by modelling the harvesting of a stylised renewable resource. Inspired by fisheries, we model the resource as distributed across patches, with connections between patches allowing the flow of stock. The harvesters are independent agents who change their harvesting strategies using a combination of three learning mechanisms with tunable relative importance. Using this model, we investigate how the learning mechanism of the harvesters, the strength of the connections between patches of the resource, and inequality in harvesters' access to the resource affect the influence of the a single sustainable zealot on the social-ecological dynamics. Measuring the overall productivity of the system and the strategies of the other agents, we show that the economic success of the zealot in the long term gives them great impact when the dominant learning mechanism is success-based imitation. We further find that the flow of stock between patches harvested by different agents has a dramatic effect on this influence, and uncover a trade-off involved in concentrating resource access in the hands of the zealot. Thus, while zealots can have a significant impact on the social-ecological dynamics of harvesting, their efficacy is influenced by the interplay of a variety of factors. Our study demonstrates the importance of considering the connections between human and natural systems, and opens up several avenues to further explore the social-ecological dynamics of harvesting.