Constructing customized modelling guidelines: A Participatory Integrated Assessment and Modelling example

As scientific modelling and integrated assessment have matured, a number of best practice guidelines have emerged. While standard guidelines play an important role in setting expectations for repetitive modelling tasks, many problems require a flexible, adaptive approach, meaning that analysts cannot simply follow a single guideline, but rather have to draw on several to construct a process to address their problem. New combined guidelines or meta-guidelines often add further complexity rather than solving the issue. In this paper, we describe two simple ideas to combine multiple guidelines in a way that provides a customizable modelling process: "pathway diagrams" and "ID cards". The former involves thinking of an analysis process in terms of a unique "pathway", divided into a set of steps, including decision forks and points for reflection and iteration. This pathway provides a structure within which steps from guidelines can be inserted. The second idea involves identifying steps recommended within guidelines and annotated them to link them to an "ID card" for that step. Each ID card then provides a quick summary of what has been said about a step across multiple guidelines. While these ID cards can pull in information from a variety of sources, they remain an individual/group's personal summary of the state of knowledge about a step, providing a common language and point of interaction for thinking about and discussing what steps can be inserted into a pathway and why. We provide an example pathway, its steps and an example of the ID card. Specifically, we build and demonstrate a Participatory Integrated Assessment and Modelling pathway drawing on key, highly cited articles. It is hoped that the pathway diagram will help implement the idea of modelling as an adaptive spiral process, containing several iterative loops to reach a fit for purpose model and agreement between stakeholders.