INTERFACES Colloquium Series - #17

The INTERFACES colloquium on 6 March 2025 demonstrated that serious research aimed to benefit the rural poor can be a playful experience. Prof. Andrew Reid Bell, from Cornell University’s Environment and Livelihoods Modelling (ELM) lab talked about his research on agent-based modelling tools which are informed by field and behavioural experiments. Working with stakeholders in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, he has developed a number of games that can highlight the stakeholders’ livelihood preferences and decisions in a variety of circumstances as well as presenting options for new approaches to land management. Andrew explained the MIDAS (Migration, Intensification and Diversification as Adaptive Strategies) modelling framework and demonstrated entertainingly the need for a “Mario-Kartization” of situations in which the poorest need to be given a boost to keep up with the better-offs in societies – and the challenges in developing appropriate parameters for success in the real world.

Given that humorous though serious prompt, the participants continued to discuss with the speaker challenges in combining economic and behavioural parameters in models, how to calibrate models to deal with uncertainties, the influence of the diversity of stakeholder groups and the persisting inequity between global South and North collaboration and shared experiences from their own modelling experience.

Prof. Bell shared a few publications with the audience: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/conservation-science/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2021.661987/full, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320724004774?via%3Dihub and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01728-0.

He can be contacted at andrew.bell@cornell.edu or visit www.elm-lab.org.