The Use of an Agent-Based Model to Represent Māori Cultural Values

Cultural values are integral to indigenous Māori culture in New Zealand and are pivotal to guiding a person’s preferences and priorities. Traditional concepts and beliefs have shaped the thinking of most Māori, and Māori knowledge still resonates strongly within contemporary Māori society. Cultural values therefore reflect both the long history and relationship tangata whenua (people of the land) have with a given area, location, catchment, or region and their world view. Cultural values are statements of knowledge, and shape the way Māori think about issues, form the basis for decision-making, and are fundamental for establishing aspirations, desires, and priorities. Iwi and hapu (tribes and sub-tribes) in the Te Tau Ihu region (northern part of the South Island) have been active in recording and expressing their cultural values for many years. Tiakina Te Taiao Ltd, a pan-iwi resource management organisation, has been developing cultural and environmental methods and indicators. A large amount of information and knowledge has been recorded onto Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and it is now a central tool for planning environmental and cultural projects, recording cultural values, and documenting significant cultural, heritage, taonga (treasure), and archaeological sites, amongst others. On the other hand, agent-based modelling (ABM) has been increasingly used to assist understanding of the interactions in complex coupled human and natural systems. These models have been combined with GIS to produce Land Use–Land Change (LULC) simulations to help conventional planning and management methods of human and landscape interaction (Gimblet, 2005; Heckbert and Smajgl, 2005; Bolte et al., 2006). These simulations have been used in social sciences for their capability of providing a spatially explicit tool that formally represents landscape characteristics, land-management choices, community values, and tradeoffs between conflicting goals. They can be used as a ‘bridge’ between quantitative and qualitative approaches, providing both formal and descriptive landscape representations to illustrate plausible alternative futures that can assist the incorporation of scientific information into decision-making processes for sustainability (van Wyk et al., 2008). The software ENVISION (Bolte, 2007) was used to construct a LULC ABM for the Motueka catchment. The components of the spatially explicit model discussed in this paper are: landscape, landscape production metrics, and agents. The landscape component has been completed; the landscape metrics have been partially built, and the agents are still being developed. Landscape includes: current land uses, land-use capability and property boundaries. Landscape production metrics include: gross margins, employment, nitrogen and sediment leaching, carbon sequestration and water use. This paper outlines selected model components and a participatory process to engage with Tiakina Te Taiao Ltd to assess whether LULC ABM technology can be effectively used as a tool for iwi to incorporate cultural values into spatial futures or scenario modelling and how iwi could use such tools to articulate cultural values and aspirations during discussion and negotiation with government, industry, research agencies, and community groups. The participatory process aims to elicit empirical knowledge on indigenous values to calibrate the ABM. The process consists of generating two extreme LULC scenarios using the envisioning capability of the model to collect information about the perception of stakeholders concerning the simulations. We will then jointly determine the feasibility of defining a cultural landscape metric function. The model and participatory process have been discussed with Tiakina Te Taiao Ltd, and they have agreed to participate in the process. So far, we have identified the model has been useful to enhance dialogue with Māori researchers on natural resource management processes, especially when the debate centres on landscape characteristics, possible land conversions, and high-level analysis of tradeoffs between socioeconomic and environmental goals.