Exploring the Role of Networks on Strategic Decisions Making of Pastoralist in Central Australia

1
Exploring the Role of Networks on Strategic
Decisions Making of Pastoralist in Central
Australia

• Agsitment Report
• Adoption - Proposal

• Collaborators
• Nick Abel, Art Langston
• Ryan McAllister, Ian Gordon
• Yiheyis Maru, Paul Box
• 2. Yiheyis Maru, Paul Box,
• Pip Pattison and Pascal Perez

2
Role of Networks on

• Purpose
• Influence of social networks on strategic
  decisions of pastoralists
• Agistment of cattle
• Adoption of innovation

3
1. Role of networks on Agistment

• Approach
• Empirical data collection
• Social network analysis multi-agent based
  modelling
• Data Collection
• 84 pastoral stations 68 pastoralists
• Interviewed 19 pastoralists
• Discussed with five key informants
• Collected individual attributes, relational data
  and pastoral records

4

• Statistical Network Modelling
• QAP (Quadratic Assignment Procedure) model in
  UCINET (Borgatti et. al. 2002)
• Exponential Random Graph (or p) models in Pnet
  (Pattison et. al. 2005)

Family ties
Agistment ties
Friendship ties
5

• Results

TABLE 1. QAP-CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS
At a0.05 plt0.05, both family and friendship
ties are significantly correlated with agistment
network.
6
Results
TABLE 2. REGRESSION COEFFICIENTS
TABLE 3. MODEL FIT
The R-square is significant but small.
7

• Preliminary finding
• Social network especially friendship ties play a
  significant role in mediating agistment practice.
  However, a lot of other factors are needed to
  explain the variability in agistment ties.
• Further work
• Parametric social network modelling (P
  approaches)
• Dynamic multi-agent and network modelling

8
Agent-Based Modelling Can a model of land
attributes and individual behavior reproduce the
global picture?
Build from the bottom up
the landscape...

• 1 km2 square of land
• Receives rain
• Grows forage
• Gets grazed

• Property collection of paddocks
• Owner moves stock
• Owner sells
• Owner agists in or out

• Paddock collection of landscape pieces
• Gets stocked

9
At what point does a pastoralist agist?
Different kinds of relationships between
pastoralists create different weights of
connections, affecting likelihood of agisting (or
other practice)

• Agisting is function of
• Land condition
• Available alternatives
• Ability to agist
• basic philosophy
• Level of trust

10
2. Role of networks on Adoption

• Why
• Pastoralism is and will continue to be a
  dominant land use in Australia
• The success of pastoralism will significantly
  depend on adoption of innovative ideas,
  technologies and sustainable management practices
  by pastoralists.

11

• Most studies are on
• attributes of innovations
• characteristics of individual pastoralists .

Farm households
Sustainable practices
Networks?
Little on the role of pastoral networks on
adoption
12
The role of Network and Adoption

• Indications of social costs
• Pastoralists that have gone green do so facing
  the disapproval of their peers (Richard et al.
  2003)
• Similar observation in our study
• General proposition
• Networks among pastoralists may play a
  significant role in filtering and reinforcing
  shared decisions with regard to adoption of
  innovative ideas, technologies and practices for
  sustainability

13
Develop a proposal

• Approach
• Workshop
• COSNet CSS
• Combine multi-agent and network modelling
• to investigate the role of the interactions of
  characteristics of new practices, and attributes
  of pastoralists and their networks
• Collaborative
• CSIRO, ANU, Uni Melb
• Applied
• involving stakeholders Desert Knowledge CRC

14
(No Transcript)