On the 17th of February 2022, Bogaziçi University organized a Living Lab in Konya, Turkey. There were over 20 participants joining the event from various sectors and professions, including farmers, officials from State Hydraulic Works, Konya Development Agency, Chamber of Agriculture, Directorate of Agriculture and Forestry, academia, and NGOs.
The meeting was organized as a full day event, aiming to create the seed conceptual structures of a socio-economic dynamic system model, by addressing the key problems that were identified during previous field encounters and a first workshop on the 30th of September 2021.
The Living Lab highlighted the main problems of common interest, policy suggestions to the remediation of the groundwater sustainability problematic against the high stakes in agricultural development, and the suggested model layers that aimed at slicing this problematic into manageable units. Model building process was driven by answering key questions such as: “How -through which mechanisms- do the groundwater reserves increase and decrease?”; "What are the conditions for the groundwater reserves to stay in equilibria?"; "What drives the seasonal water extraction capacity?"; "What drives the seasonal irrigation water demand in a particular season?"; "What happens if there is a gap between water demand and water supply in a particular season?".
The outline of each modelling activity encompassed: building shared understanding on the physical (real life) representation on the model-in-progress; building shared understanding on the seed stock-flow template that derives seed model development; ratio exercises; variable elicitation; and cause-and-effect thinking to derive the conceptual model structure. Lastly, each modelling activity ended with eliciting few overarching feedback loops and discussion on the consequences of policy problems to the extent that they can be anticipated through an inquiry over that feedback loops.