Trade -offs, efficiency gains and technical change - Modeling water management and land use within a multiple-agent framework

Summary Decisions on natural resource use are usually taken by individual resource users such as farm-households and landowners within an existing legal and policy framework; their consequences on the natural resource base, however, can sometimes be felt at much larger scales due to the complex interdependencies among these resources. Linking biophysical and socioeconomic processes, identifying their consequences at different scales or levels of analysis, and formulating suitable policy options based on these analyses remains a difficult research task. This article suggests to combine aggregate and disaggregate mathematical programming models that relate land and water resources within a multiple scale - multiple agent framework. Such an approach promises to generate valuable information for policy development as it captures more fully temporal and spatial scales of human-nature interactions; provides a way to address interrelated water and land use issues; and allows the inclusion of policy responses from farmers’ and other resource users’ points of view.