A role-playing game as a tool to facilitate social learning and collective action towards Climate Smart Agriculture: Lessons learned from Apuí, Brazil

Sustaining rural livelihoods through an integrated landscape approach

“…One cause surely is improper agricultural policy -for instance, subsidizing maize production with the consequence of replacing diverse farming systems by maize monoculture, and moreover creating new fi nancial dependencies along the maize value chain. A landscape approach aims at bringing together competing stakeholders through tools fostering communication and working out a common vision of an area (Perrotton et al, 2017;Salvini et al, 2016). Regarding common rules, our behavioural experiment indicates that communication indeed performs at least as well as strong enforcement (Röttgers, 2016).…”

“…The development of science-based role plays for negotiations in business and political contexts is one of the services off ered by Harvard Law School in the program on negotiation (PON, 2017); correspondingly adapted tools could also be applied in the CBNRM context of developing countries. With the aim of resolving confl icts, environmental games provide an opportunity to discuss the natural, social and political dimensions of political disputes, for example in the fi eld of transboundary water management and climate change adaption (Rumore et al, 2016). There are numerous examples of the willingness of decision makers to participate in such activities, and research on the impact of role-playing on confl ict resolution continues.…”

“…Food security which in turn can advise decision-making (Perrotton et al, 2017;Purnomo et al, 2009;Röttgers, 2016;Salvini et al, 2016;Speelman et al, 2014;.…”

“…In addition to ESAM and CGE analyses, several focus group meetings, behavioural experiments, and role-plays (Fig. 2) have been organized to initiate discussions on sustainable landscape management among community members (Röttgers, 2016;Winter et al, 2017). Finally, an ABM has been designed to give a picture of current land use activities in the study region and to simulate eff ects of newly introduced agricultural practices such as agroforestry with Faidherbia albida, a nitrogen-fi xing tree (Koch, 2017).…”

“…A landscape approach aims at bringing together competing stakeholders through tools fostering communication and working out a common vision of an area (Perrotton et al, 2017;Salvini et al, 2016). Regarding common rules, our behavioural experiment indicates that communication indeed performs at least as well as strong enforcement (Röttgers, 2016). The development of science-based role plays for negotiations in business and political contexts is one of the services off ered by Harvard Law School in the program on negotiation (PON, 2017); correspondingly adapted tools could also be applied in the CBNRM context of developing countries.…”