Lessons from the Trenches: Twenty Years of Using Systems Thinking in Natural Resource Conflict Situations

Natural resource management is rich with systems complexity, which is amplified when interest group politics and tactics create an overlay of strategic behaviors. For the past two decades, systems thinking techniques have comprised a key part of the Collaborative Learning facilitation methodology in natural resources management and environmental policy decision making. This essay focuses specifically on the contribution that systems thinking makes to the facilitation of natural resource conflict, drawing upon broad observations drawn from a number of applications. The discussion provides a context for understanding the systemic complexity of natural resource conflicts, offers a brief summary of a particular systems-based facilitation paradigm (i.e. Collaborative Learning), and then presents a set of lessons that have emerged from 20 years of application. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.