摘要：Over the centuries, local communities have shaped atypical rules to deal with the uncertainty of their environment.They have developed complex prototypes for flexible overlapping institutions and arrangements to adapt their rules and uses totheir uncertain environment. Today, this indigenous way of flexibly institutionalizing access rules could provide blueprints fordealing with uncertainty issues resulting from global change as well as designing practical guidelines for implementing resilientmanagement. However, transforming indigenous skills for developing institutional flexibility into operational management rulesthat are appropriate in the current environmental and socioeconomic context is a huge challenge. However, communities couldeasily succeed in this reframing because the structuring principles of institutional flexibility are embedded in their mind frame.In this perspective, a participatory modeling process was applied in Senegal to explore, first, how to design a methodologicalplatform to enable local people to shape different forms of environmental management and policies they consider appropriatein the new context of environmental uncertainty by drawing on their own attitudes to environmental management. Second, toincrease the value of such "self-designed" outputs in improving knowledge about, and improving, the practical management ofuncertainty, especially in drylands
