Board games designed to breakdown stubbornly entrenched roles and conflicts over conservation issues such as climate change and land clearing can break deadlocks and drive urgently-needed policy change, according to a journal paper by 23 researchers from 13 countries in Europe and North America.
They argue radical change is needed – it’s time to move beyond the rhetoric of global policy forums and try something different.
Lead author Claude Garcia, an ecologist with the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) in Montpellier, gave a TED talk on the subject in 2019. He argued that little progress was being made on critical conservation issues and a shake up was needed.
“If properly thought out and conducted, games can be a powerful tool to understand how women and men make decisions, to explore alternative strategies, to attempt to counter them, to negotiate new agreements and to understand the limits of our knowledge and the flaws in our reasoning. It is so much easier to play chess with the board and pieces in full view than blindfolded,” he said.
In a paper published this month in the journal One Earth, the group of 23 researchers argue that global agreements intended to halt deforestation and restore forest ecosystems are missing their targets.
“According to Global Forest Watch, annual tree-cover loss reached 29.7 million hectares globally in 2016, a 51 per cent increase since 2015. In the tropics, 12 million hectares—an area the size of Belgium—were lost in 2018 alone,” the paper says.
“We hypothesize that a key reason for ineffectiveness lies in a failure to recognize the
agency of the many stakeholders involved—their capacity to act independently and to make their own free choices—and the adaptive capacities of the systems we seek to steer. Landscapes do not happen; we shape them.”
There’s also been a loss of trust in the ability of global “talkfests” to achieve serious policy change. The Pacific Islands Forum, held in Tuvalu in August 2019, showed what happens when a participant (in this case Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison) won’t budge from an entrenched policy position (support for coal-fired power). And, the game that’s played out is about regional power dynamics and political party dominance, not climate policy.
How can the game at these talkfests be changed?
The paper suggests that trying to agree on a common vision is “difficult, exhausting, and possibly impossible if the values held are at loggerheads.” Ah yes Australia, that’s the current state of play with the increasingly toxic debate over management of wild horses in alpine national parks in Victoria and New South Wales. The debate has become so polarised and vehement that there’s little, if any, middle ground for more moderate voices to suggest ideas. And it’s a conflict that’s been raging on and off for decades…..
How do you break a deadlock like that? Here’s what the One Earth paper suggests in relation to land clearing and forest conservation…..
“Given that definitions of forests are political statements, simply agreeing on what to
monitor already proves a challenge,” it says.
“Deforestation happens because locally, and in the short run, it is the most logical and rewarding course of action.”
However, games can cut across these stubborn views by asking participants to take on roles that require them to listen to others, and to negotiate an inclusive solution. No, you can’t hide behind your title, policy position or bland management phrases.
“A game session allows the game to become a tool for establishing an inclusive, engaging, and constructive dialogue and facilitate the negotiation process, leading to an agreement when none was previously in sight,” the paper says.
“Why should we focus on games particularly? Because to overcome the cognitive biases that prevent changes to our mental models, there are few better ways than to force people to take a new vantage point and to look carefully at what can be seen from that point. When faced with a situation that is beyond their control yet in a safe environment, participants become alert, a state that makes it easier for them to reflect and learn.”
In his TED talk, Garcia argues that these games allow participants to become more aware of how they make decisions and to reflect on how this affects others. And it’s not just theory. He says the use of games proved to be “particularly successful” in2018, when it broke a two-year deadlock over forest management in the Congo Basin.
“The game acted as a model to clarify key concepts, to illustrate the different situations they were discussing, and to explore the potential impacts of the options they were considering,” Garcia wrote in an editorial for Mongabay, an independent environmental news service.
“In three days, we helped the participants move from gridlock to a joint declaration on five points, four of them accepted through unanimous votes… the game became a tool to not only create a better understanding of the system, but also to establish a dialogue and facilitate the decision-making process.”
the hound 