An evolving simulation/gaming process to facilitate adaptive watershed management in northern mountainous Thailand

Barnaud, Cécile; Promburom, Tanya; Trébuil, Guy; Bousquet, François

doi:10.1177/1046878107300670

Cited by 48 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The RPG and MAS model used in the previous cycle were modified to conceive a new set of RPG and MAS model adjusted to the villagers' socio-economic preoccupations. A detailed description of the way the RPG and MAS models were adjusted is available in (Barnaud et al 2007a). Both tools were used with villagers during a three day long participatory modelling and simulation workshop held in the village school.…”

Section: Methodology Used In the Second Commod Cycle Focusing On Creditmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-agent simulations to explore rules for rural credit in a highland farming community of Northern Thailand

Barnaud

Bousquet

Trébuil

2008

Ecological Economics

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Multi-agent systems (MAS) open new modelling and analysis perspectives in ecological and social sciences. An original characteristic of the Companion Modelling (ComMod) approach adopted in this case study is the co-construction and use of a MAS model with and for local stakeholders such as farmers and local administrators. Alternating iteratively field and modelling activities, this approach facilitates collective learning among local stakeholders and between them and the researchers. Combining the use of MAS models with Role-Playing Games (RPG), the described experiment aimed to facilitate collective decision-making in a socially heterogeneous community of small farmers in mountainous northern Thailand about the local rules for the allocation of rural credit to allow a more equitable and extensive process of expansion of non-erosive perennial crops in a watershed prone to erosion. This paper presents the MAS model and the results of a series of simulations exploring the ecological, social and economic effects of various rules for formal and informal credit suggested by the villagers-participants. Six scenarios considered as pertinent to further explore the participants' suggestions were defined based on different combinations among the following three variables: (i) Duration for the reimbursement of loans, (ii) Mode of allocation of formal credit among three different types of farms, (iii) Configuration of networks of acquaintances for access to informal credit. Drawing on this case study, we first elaborate on the potential of bottom-up models such as MAS to analyze the functioning of agricultural systems, in particular farm differentiation and rural credit dynamics. We highlight the ability of MAS to deal with interactions between social and ecological dynamics and to take into account social interactions, in particular the concept of social capital which is a determining factor when dealing with sustainability issues. The second question addressed in this paper deals with the potential and limits of MAS models to support a bottom-up (or participatory) modelling approach. This experiment suggests that the usefulness of models relies much more on the modelling process than on the model itself, because a model is usually useless if it is misunderstood by its potential users, or if it does not respond to their current preoccupations. The intuitive representation of real systems provided by MAS and their high flexibility are the two underlined characteristics favouring their appropriation by local stakeholders.

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Section: Methodology Used In the Second Commod Cycle Focusing On Creditmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-agent simulations to explore rules for rural credit in a highland farming community of Northern Thailand

Barnaud

Bousquet

Trébuil

2008

Ecological Economics

Self Cite

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“…Within advocates of local participatory processes, some cast doubts about those supposedly participatory approaches that end up empowering the already powerful (Rudqvist and Woodford-Berger 1996;Barnaud et al 2007). Participatory role playing game designers are keen to avoid such situations (Barnaud et al 2007) by trying to make them instruments that effectively promote inclusion, communication, reflection and social learning among stakeholders in conflict.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Barnaud et al 2007;Sandkler et al 2010) expect an increasing need for landscape-level cooperation and coordination in order to strengthen adaptive co-management and governance of social-environmental processes. While developing more sophisticated RPGs and scenario simulators, we have continued to find SS to be both a promising research tool and a good introduction to coordination dilemmas and strategies for those stakeholders involved in building and/or using more realistic role playing games in the context of participatory rural land use planning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social dilemmas and individual/group coordination strategies in a complex rural land-use game

Garcı́a-Barrios

García-Barrios²,

Waterman³

et al. 2011

Int J Commons

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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.

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“…They found that the presence of a fishery creates a reciprocal dependence -the order of access to fish is the opposite of the order of access to water -that increases the resilience of the decentralized solution. Some researchers have also built ABMs collaboratively with those being modelled, as a means of facilitating cooperation and resource sharing (Barnaud et al 2007;Naivinit et al 2010;Barnaud et al 2006).…”

Section: Agent-based Modellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The IDT approach departs from companion modelling style approaches, where the model is built through an interactive process involving the stakeholders that the model represents (Barnaud et al 2007;Gurung et al 2006;Naivinit et al 2010;Naivinit et al 2008;Hoanh et al 2008). Companion modelling exercises are typically undertaken to facilitate shared learning and enhance cooperation that can address existing conflicts.…”

Section: Games and Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demonstrating complexity with a roleplaying simulation: investing in water in the Indrawati Subbasin, Nepal

Janmaat¹,

Lapp²,

Wannop³

et al. 2015

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1631985 2015 Research ReportsThe publications in this series cover a wide range of subjects-from computer modeling to experience with water user associations-and vary in content from directly applicable research to more basic studies, on which applied work ultimately depends. Some research reports are narrowly focused, analytical and detailed empirical studies; others are wide-ranging and synthetic overviews of generic problems.Although most of the reports are published by IWMI staff and their collaborators, we welcome contributions from others. Each report is reviewed internally by IWMI staff, and by external reviewers. The reports are published and distributed both in hard copy and electronically (www.iwmi.org) and where possible all data and analyses will be available as separate downloadable files. Reports may be copied freely and cited with due acknowledgment. About IWMIIWMI's mission is to provide evidence-based solutions to sustainably manage water and land resources for food security, people's livelihoods and the environment. IWMI works in partnership with governments, civil society and the private sector to develop scalable agricultural water management solutions that have a tangible impact on poverty reduction, food security and ecosystem health.

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An evolving simulation/gaming process to facilitate adaptive watershed management in northern mountainous Thailand

Cited by 48 publications

References 9 publications

Multi-agent simulations to explore rules for rural credit in a highland farming community of Northern Thailand

Multi-agent simulations to explore rules for rural credit in a highland farming community of Northern Thailand

Social dilemmas and individual/group coordination strategies in a complex rural land-use game

Demonstrating complexity with a roleplaying simulation: investing in water in the Indrawati Subbasin, Nepal

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