ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of participatory simulation as a tool for policy informatics and some of its unresolved challenges, highlights relevant literature, describes an exemplary prototype, and proposes a research agenda. The participatory simulations support multi-sector stakeholder engagement and capacity building for community-based natural resource governance. As an educational tool and a shared research laboratory, participatory simulations such as the UVA Bay Game, provide distinctive opportunities for complex systems learning and for investigating the relation among complex systems thinking, data correlation, communication, decision-making, social behavior, and behavior change. Traditional simulation models are typically expressed in the form of equation-based models that relate a set of input parameters and assumptions through a collection of equations that produce system states and outputs. The quantification associated with complex adaptive system simulation provides additional rigor for adequate anthropological explanations of physical artifacts of social integration.
