Resonances to improve environmental and natural resources management

Characterizing the motivating components of individual or group narratives can help understand how different stakeholders and communities engage with each other, and how information, values, and beliefs are used to arrive at decisions affecting social-ecological systems (SES). A set of “resonances”, factors depicting what people care about and are willing to express, is presented along with applications relating to water and environmental management in New Zealand and in the USA. The resonances describe commonly encountered preferences, beliefs, needs, and motivations (PBNM) expressed in individual and/or group narratives. Resonance analyses can be used to record expressed PBNM. Recognition of resonances could also be used, possibly in real-time and aided by AI tools, to plan, track progress, facilitate, and enhance critical reflective thinking for participatory modeling and stakeholder/community engagement processes. Resonance analyses could be applied to more transparently document, understand, and improve management and decision-making for SES resource and environmental issues over longer-term periods, even with changes in decision actors and redistributions of decision powers. The set of resonances presented in this paper is an important tool that can be used to create, curate, and add to knowledge bases and records of engagement and decision-making for natural resource and environmental issues and for SES.