Building stakeholders' mutual understanding of seaweed sustainability in Indonesia: A group model building approach

Despite the industry's expansion, the Indonesian seaweed industry continues to face numerous challenges in achieving sustainability. Facilitating stakeholder dialogue is critical but rather complex, given their different perspectives and often competing interests and priorities. Therefore, this paper showcases how the application of Group Model Building (GMB) can effectively engage stakeholders and facilitate them to collectively identify critical issues against sustainability within the Indonesian seaweed value chain system. Specifically, the GMB approach facilitates the construction of a causal loop diagram to describe the interlinkages and feedback interactions between sustainability issues, causes, and consequences through three steps: problem identification, formulating a dynamic hypothesis, and model validation. The GMB process reveals that the seaweed value chain is a complex system, with underlying issues such as seaweed availability and quality that may threaten the industry's sustainability. The combination of these two issues also influences price dynamics and the competitiveness of seaweed products in the global market, ultimately detrimenting the sustainability of the seaweed industry. The study demonstrates the advantages of the GMB process, including developing a conceptual model portraying a holistic view of the seaweed industry and fostering mutual understanding and consensus among stakeholders about critical issues, causes, and consequences across the seaweed value chain systems. Consequently, this can facilitate more effective policymaking and priority-setting. However, it should be noted that conducting GMB requires proper preparation, resources, and time, as well as good initial communication with stakeholders.