The conservation game

Conservation problems typically involve groups with competing objectives and strategies. Taking effective conservation action requires identifying dependencies between competing strategies and determining which action optimally achieves the appropriate conservation goals given those dependencies. We show how several real-world conservation problems can be modeled game-theoretically. Three types of problems drive our analysis: multi-national conservation cooperation, management of common-pool resources, and games against nature. By revealing the underlying structure of these and other problems, game-theoretic models suggest potential solutions that are often invisible to the usual management protocol: decision followed by monitoring, feedback and revised decisions. The kind of adaptive management provided by the game-theoretic approach therefore complements existing adaptive management methodologies.