Possibilistic pathways and decision-making for goal achievement in integrated agritourism

Abstract

Diversification of agricultural systems in order to integrate off-farm activities, like tourism, is a way to improve the overall system resilience while shaping a project that is eco-friendly as well as socially relevant. However, creating and maintaining such an integrated agritouristic system requires finding a way to organize individual and collective management of activities and commons in order to articulate the founding goals and values with day-to-day functioning. Current modeling tools are limited in the number of aspects they can integrate because of data requirement and because of the high number of dimensions that it involves. In this study, we characterize a case study of integrated agritourism possible pathways leading to a target corresponding to the founding socio-ecological goals of its stakeholders. We propose to build an innovative exploratory model representing the socio-ecological dynamics of an integrated agritouristic system following the qualitative and possibilistic Ecological Discrete-Event Network (EDEN) framework. The model outputs revealed that pathways leading to the target exist and can be more or less straightforward. However, the ability to reach the target can also be lost after a few steps due to a set of biophysical reactions and management decisions affecting sensitive states. Some of these pathways ultimately lead to an agritouristic system that could be considered fully functional but unable to fulfill the socio-ecological goals of its stakeholders. A form of path dependency emerges from these results: transitions involving one or a subset of activities can lead the whole system towards an irreversible and undesirable pathway. It results from a high level of interdependency between the activities. Identifying such lock-in effects can be a first step towards co-constructed path-breaking.