From Individual Agency to Community Resilience: Modelling the Effectiveness of Women-Led Co-Learning Spaces on Climate Action in Jodhpur Using Agent-Based Simulation and Interpretive Structural Modelling

The semi-arid urban settlement of Jodhpur, India, stands at a critical juncture where rapid urbanization and climate change threaten its historic resilience mechanisms. This study investigates the efficacy of immersive workshops conducted in co-learning spaces as vehicles for decentralized hyperlocal climate governance and action. Specifically, it examines how participants of such workshops can function as agents of change within their larger communities by leveraging the existing social practice of Hathai—informal gatherings where women discuss community affairs. Adopting a computational social science approach, we integrate primary data from 25 women community leaders into a stochastic Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) to model the contagion of climate resilience across a synthetic network of 300 community members. Furthermore, Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) is employed to map the hierarchical causalities between cognitive and behavioural metrics. Our results reveal a significant paradox: while Climate Knowledge acts as the fundamental structural driver (Level 1) of the resilience ecosystem, it exhibits the lowest transmission rate (24.1% gain). Conversely, Action Intent and Confidence demonstrate the highest contagion potential (38.3% gain), suggesting that behavior propagates faster than information in this cultural context. The study illustrates a plausible structural pathway where traditional ecological wisdom serves as a critical linkage, converting abstract knowledge into tangible reductions in social vulnerability indices (SoVI) and enhancements in Sen’s capability approach. We conclude that such smaller intra-community groups as decentralized, women-led nodes could be a viable strategy for hyper-local climate action.