Managing social-ecological systems increasingly requires collaboration among diverse teams with a wide range of worldviews and perspectives. Increased attention to the social and cultural factors that shape environmental outcomes is needed for these collaborative teams to function effectively. Mental models are cognitive representations of the external world which guide an individual’s thinking, decision-making, and behavior. They are critical elements of collaborative environmental management because they shape our understanding of social-ecological systems, our perceptions of environmental problems, and our preferences for certain management actions. In this paper, we describe an iterative process of constructing and revising mental models at both individual and small group levels over the course of a year in a community-based conservation area in the Ethiopian highlands. We compared mental models of the conservation area from four groups involved in management to identify commonalities and differences in the way people conceptualize the area. While we found high variability in mental models both within and across groups, most participants perceived social, economic, and political variables to be the key drivers of change in this system. Economic variables were also identified as key sensitivities, along with biotic and livelihood variables. However, groups differed considerably in how they thought about relationships between these variables, particularly political and economic variables. We used interviews with participants to assess how they learned throughout the mental modeling process, finding evidence of changes to stakeholder relationships, system understanding, and the time horizons used in planning. Women farmers differed from other groups at multiple stages in our process, both in the structure of the models they produced and in the social learning they experienced. Our study was strengthened by the iterative process that allowed individuals and small groups to reflect on their own understanding and share it with others, resulting in increased communication, mutual respect, and understanding among members of the management team. These findings point to the complementarity of both individual and group-level mental modeling for nuanced system understanding, and emphasize the need for diverse perspectives in collaborative environmental management in order for holistic understanding of both problems and solutions to emerge.

管理社会生态系统越来越需要具有广泛世界观和观点的多样化团队之间的协作。为了使这些协作团队有效运作，需要更多地关注影响环境结果的社会和文化因素。心理模型是外部世界的认知表示，可以指导个人的思维，决策和行为。它们是协作环境管理的关键元素，因为它们塑造了我们对社会生态系统的理解，我们对环境问题的认识以及我们对某些管理措施的偏好。在本文中，我们描述了在一年的过程中，在埃塞俄比亚高地基于社区的保护区中，在个人和小组级别上构建和修改心理模型的迭代过程。我们从参与管理的四个小组中比较了保护区的心理模型，以确定人们对保护区的概念上的共性和差异。尽管我们发现群体内部和群体之间心理模型的高度可变性，但大多数参与者认为社会，经济和政治变量是该系统变化的主要驱动力。经济变量以及生物和生计变量也被确定为关键敏感性。但是，各团体在如何看待这些变量之间的关系上存在很大差异，尤其是政治和经济变量。我们通过与参与者的访谈来评估他们在整个心智建模过程中的学习方式，找到与利益相关者关系，系统理解以及计划中所用时间跨度发生变化的证据。女农民在我们过程中的多个阶段与其他群体有所不同，无论是她们创造的模型的结构还是她们所经历的社会学习。迭代过程使我们的研究得到了加强，该迭代过程使个人和小组可以反思自己的理解并与他人共享，从而增加了管理团队成员之间的沟通，相互尊重和理解。这些发现表明，个人和小组心理模型对于细微的系统理解是相辅相成的，