Tailoring Cognitive Mapping Analysis Methods to Different Management Styles of Collective Action by Handling Actor Reasoning Diversity

Collective action is needed to conceive and implement sustainability transitions within our society. Yet, it requires the coordination of a diversity of actors, each possessing their own reasoning. Integrating diversity, characterized by variety, disparity and balance, is thus a crucial methodological challenge to address, notably in order to enhance the quality of policy decisions concerning sustainability issues. Here we show how to tailor the way of collecting, analyzing and using actor reasoning diversity to the management style of collective action, characterized by the role the actors are allowed to play in defining collective action. To this purpose, we compare three design experiments using actor reasoning in the context of collective action aiming at developing sustainable food production: (1) considering actor reasoning in top-down decision-making (scallop fishery in Integrated Coastal Zone Management); (2) building consensus for a common strategy (quality in a sheep milk cooperative); and (3) fostering collective intelligence for individual and collective paths for action (agroecological transition of an agricultural territory). The diversity of actor reasoning in each of the design experiments was collected through cognitive mapping, a systemic representation tool adapted to represent actor reasoning. We propose a framework to adapt cognitive mapping methods to different management styles of collective action. In practice, adjusting the level and nature of the reasoning diversity considered at each step of a participatory process, through the way cognitive maps are collected and analyzed, is key to the tailoring of a cognitive mapping method to a management style of collective action. Overall, we show that the level of reasoning diversity considered in collective action should increase with actor involvement in analyses and decision-making.