Strengthening ongoing bottom-up capacity building processes for local and sustainable landscape-level governance is a multi-dimensional social endeavor. One of the tasks involved -participatory rural land use planning -requires more understanding and more awareness among all stakeholders regarding the social dilemmas local people confront when responding to each other's land-use decisions.In this paper we will analyze and discuss a version of our game SIERRA SPRINGS that is simple to play for any stakeholder that can count to 24, yet entails a complexcoordination land use game -with an extensive and yet finite set of solutions -which can mimic in a stylized form some of the dilemmas landowners could confront in a landscape planning process where there livelihoods are at stake. The game has helped researchers and players observe and reflect on the individual coordination strategies that emerge within a group in response to these stylized dilemmas. This paper (1) develops a game-theoretical approach to cooperation, competition and coordination of land uses in small rural watersheds (2) describe the goal, rules and mechanics of the game (3) analyzes the structure of each farms' solution set vs. the whole watershed's solution set (4) derives from them the coordination dilemmas and the risk of coordination failure (5) describes four individual coordination Social dilemmas and individual/group coordination strategies 365 strategies consistently displayed by players; mapping them in a plane we have called Group-Level Coordination Space (6) discusses the strengths, limitations and actual and potential uses of the game both for research and as an introductory tool for stakeholders involved in participatory land use planning.Keywords: Common pool resources, coordination dilemmas, coordination strategies, role playing game, rural land use planning Acknowledgements: We wish to thank the people who contributed to develop the Sierra Spring role-playing game and the 160 persons who participated in the workshops reported here. Special thanks to James Reynolds and the ARIDNET group who sponsored an international workshop that inspired the development of the game. We thank Jim Smith and Abryl Ramírez Salazar for deriving the solution vectors of SIERRA SPRINGS, Hugo Perales Rivera for statistical advice and Romeo Trujillo, Abril Valdivieso, Erika Speelman, Eric Vides and Claudia Brunel for helping with some of the workshop's logistics. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments. This study was funded by CONACYT project 51293 and FORDECYT project 116306, Mexico.
ABSTRACT. Small-scale coffee farmers understand certain complex ecological processes, and successfully navigate some of the challenges emerging from the ecological complexity on their farms. It is generally thought that scientific knowledge is able to complement farmers' knowledge. However, for this collaboration to be fruitful, the gap between the knowledge frameworks of both farmers and scientists will need to be closed. We report on the learning results of 14 workshops held in Chiapas, Mexico during 2015 in which 117 small-scale coffee farmers of all genders (30% women) and ages who had little schooling were exposed by researchers to a natural history narrative, a multispecies network representation, a board game, and a series of graphical quizzes, all related to a nine-species complex ecological network with potential for autonomous control of the ongoing and devastating coffee rust epidemic that was affecting them. Farmers' retention and understanding of direct and indirect bilateral interactions among organisms was assessed with different methods to elucidate the effect of adding Azteca Chess gaming sessions to a detailed and very graphical lecture. Evaluation methods that were better adapted to farmers' conditions improved learning scores and showed statistically significant age effect (players older than 40 had lower retention scores) and gaming effect (lower retention of interactions included in the lecture but not in the game). The combination of lecture and game sessions helped participants better understand cascades of trait-mediated interactions. Participants' debriefings confirmed qualitatively that they learned that beneficial organisms and interactions occur on their farms, and that gaming was enjoyable, motivating, and critical to grasp complex interactions. Many of the farmers concluded that the outcome of these interactions is not unique and not always in favor of rust control but is context dependent. Many concluded that there are feasible things they can do on their farms, derived from what they learned, to favor potential autonomous pest control.
ABSTRACT. The lives of poor landowners in tropical mountains depend upon their collective capacity to create and coordinate social preferences derived from their interacting communalistic, hierarchical, and reciprocal exchanges. External actors currently contend for these territories under market rules that are modifying such preferences. We present the design, experimental implementation, and analysis of results of a four-player, land-use board game with stark resource and livelihood limits and coordination/cooperation challenges, as played (separately) by 116 farmers and 108 academics, mainly in the tropical mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. In game session one, we trained and framed players in moral economy, a human core feeling and communalistic norm of solidarity and mutual obligation, which translates into "all players must survive." In session two, we explored to what extent moral economy resisted as a social preference under a hypothetical external monetary incentive scheme unfavorable to it. Using an approach that combines spot game analysis and experimental work, we studied the social preferences that emerged during session two among advantaged and disadvantaged players to deal with inequity in land appropriation and use when imminent "death" approaches. We make comparisons between farmers and academics. Players evolved moral economy, competitive domination, i.e., let competition decide, and coalition, i.e., advantaged players ask the dying to surrender land and die prematurely in exchange for a share of the dismal profits. Farmers basically stuck to the first two preferences in similar proportions whereas academics clearly shifted to coalition, a last-resort choice, which allowed disadvantaged players some final leverage and advantaged players use of liberated resources to improve efficiency. Coalition as strategic cooperation among the unequal is part of the culture in which academics are being educated as sustainability professionals and toward which farmers are being steered. In the stringent social-environmental conditions of this game, the results were a Pareto-superior form of equity, albeit with land surrendering, and many more deaths than other preferences.
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