Fuzzy Cognitive Map to Support Conflict Analysis in Drought Management

Empirical investigations in scientific literature have highlighted the differences between the stakeholders' perceptions of a given drought phenomenon's severity and the results of scientific - technical evaluation. This means that there can be several perceptions of the phenomenon, and the scientific models used to assess the drought's severity do not consider these differences. Facing a drought phenomenon, stakeholders adopt different mental models to assess its severity, taking into account additional elements, other than just water availability and climatic conditions. This, in turn, could have a strong negative impact on the effectiveness of drought mitigation strategies. In fact, if the mitigation actions are selected without considering the stakeholders' perceptions of the drought, then the actions themselves could be considered as unsatisfactory by the stakeholders or, even worst, not acceptable at all. If the degree of acceptability is low, then the implementation of the mitigation actions could be hampered by strong opposition from the stakeholders. Therefore, an in depth analysis of the potential conflicts and the definition of effective negotiation strategies could be really useful. In this perspective, we propose a methodology based on a Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) to support the elicitation and the analysis of stakeholders' perceptions of drought, and the analysis of potential conflicts. The method was applied to a drought management process in the Trasimeno Lake area (Umbria Region) in order to analyze potential conflict.