Abstract
The “Life-environmentalism”, the “community co-management approach”, and a mathematical approach guided by a social dilemma perspective have a common direction in their studies: How can people themselves manage their local environmental problems successfully. This paper aims to promote a mutual understanding and a collaboration among these three approaches. The life-environmentalism has a clear method that could provide the mathematical approach with detailed information about games played in a local community. The community co-management approach has specified important factors for successful management of the local environment. These two approaches and their findings could be utilized by the mathematical approach to develop new models for analyzing the local environmental problems.
The mathematical approaches, on the other hand, can show a logical foundation of a certain kind of community “stabilizing mechanism”, a social ostracism for example, that is presupposed in the life-environmentalism. This approach could also contribute the community co-management approach by showing the validity of the factors found in the field studies.
