A Role-Playing Game for Land Use Planning and Conflict Resolution
Around and within the forests, a multitude of different actors are involved: farmers, breeders, hunters, fishermen, timber companies, local authorities and organizations focused on forest conservation. Balancing the interests and needs of all these stakeholders for the effective use and management of natural resources is a highly complex task and conflicts often arise in these regions for various reasons.
To help stakeholders find solutions for co-managing natural resources, GIZ developed a role-playing boardgame. This game simulates the evolution of an ecosystem under human pressure due to natural resources use and extraction over time for several purposes. The board can be customized to represents the various elements of a territory, its forests, fields, water bodies and urban center, in which the stakeholders operate. A trained facilitator guides the participants through the game simulating their farming and/or forestry operations. Each workshop concludes with a debriefing and collective discussion, led by the facilitator.
Contexto
Défis à relever
The challenge our solution addresses is finding ways to avoid or descale social conflicts and create a favourable environment to resolve to find effective and sustainable solutions for land and natural resources use. The three main types of conflicts identified are those between farmers and herders, conflicts among farmers themselves, and conflicts between the local population and logging companies. Other sources of conflict also exist but are less frequent, such as population-wildlife conflicts, conflicts among herders, and inter-village conflicts. By allowing different actors to take on the roles of others and through the questions posed by the facilitator, players are placed in an ideal setting to discuss these issues and gain a comprehensive understanding of all the stakeholders, problems and dynamics involved. Indirectly, the game also helps to recognize the value of trees and sustainable land use, promoting these practices.
Ubicación
Procesar
Summary of the process
As important as the game itself is, it’s ultimately just a tool to spark the reflection that follows. That’s why creating the right conditions for the game is essential. It’s crucial to ensure that the facilitator is well-prepared and that participants, which are living in conflict zones over land use, are ready to consider perspectives other than their own. Once these conditions are in place, the game serves as a trigger for deeper reflection and opens the door to meaningful debate. The facilitator plays a key role, using the game as a reference point to guide the discussion, pose insightful questions, and enhance the dialogue with visual aids like maps.
Building Blocks
Participants and facilitator
Before the game can be played, the facilitator must be trained, and the participants selected.
The choice of a game facilitator should fall on someone knowledgeable about land use issues and who knows the social background, culture, language and customs of the local communities, as this expertise is crucial for leading the final debate. To prepare the facilitator, a good approach is to have them play the game once, along with other future facilitators. The goal of this first trial is not only to train them, but also to adjust the game rules to the local context. The game functions better when tailored to the local context. After the trial, a debriefing should be conducted to assess what worked well, what didn’t, and to determine what events or tokens could be created to best represent the region where the game will be played.
To select the participants, the organizers can work with the village chiefs, who will help identify and mobilize the various groups affected by the land use issue to participate in the game. They also can assist in selecting an appropriate location for the game to take place.
Participants should come from diverse groups, including young people, women, farmers, breeders, and others. During the game, it may be beneficial to sometimes keep these groups together and at other times mix them, in order to foster different dynamics and debates.
Enabling factors
-knowledge of the facilitator in land use planning, social issues, ecological dynamics and ecosystem services
-interest of the participants to cooperate with other stakeholders
-mutual trust between participants and with the facilitator
-contact should be made with the village chief
-open atmosphere
Lesson learned
-To reach the participants, a good way would be to get in contact with the village chief.
- Having facilitators that belong to the same culture of participants and talk the same language is very helpful to create an open and safe environment.
- During training phase, don’t plan or add too many process, elements and rules to the game to reflect the local context, elements will arise more naturally while playing if the game remain enough flexible.
Playing
To start the game, a map representing the local area is first created. The facilitator begins by asking participants to describe their land and sketches features as they respond. Once all key elements are outlined, color-coded hexagonal tiles, called ‘parcels,’ are placed over the drawing to form the board. Each tile’s color reflects soil fertility, ranging from high to low fertility. These parcels generate trees and resources based on their fertility levels. The board is designed to represent various landscapes, including mature forests, young forests, savannahs, and rivers or lakes. Wildlife such as forest animals and fish can also be added. Additionally, extra tiles may be introduced to capture local specifics.
Next, players are assigned a certain number of family members to manage. For each family member, they choose activities such as farming, breeding, or fishing to gather resources. To encourage new perspectives, the facilitator invites players to select activities different from those they do in real life. The game proceeds in rounds alternating between rainy and dry seasons, with each season affecting activities and resource availability. Throughout the game, the facilitator introduces events and, at the end of each season, leads a brief debrief to discuss players’ feelings about the current situation.
Enabling factors
-open atmosphere
-willingness of the participants to try other points of view
-interest of the participants to participate to the game
-willingness of the participants to do land use planning
-trained moderator
Lesson learned
-It is recommended to plan 2 rounds of sessions for each community: the first with each different group of stakeholders separately (e.g. farmers, herders, women, local organizations), the second one with mixed groups.
-It is recommended to adapt the board to the local landscape and create new categories depending on the specifics of the place
-The schedule shouldn’t be too tie, delay can occur quickly
-Having the player choose another activity than the one they usually do helps them to gain more insights for the debate part
Resources
Debriefing
The debriefing occurs both during and after the game. Brief debriefs can take place after each session to gauge participants’ feelings about the game at individual and territorial levels. These are kept light to maintain the game’s flow.
Once the game is over, a more in-depth debriefing can take place. It doesn’t necessarily have to happen immediately after the game; it could be scheduled for the following day. Some preparation is required for this discussion. The facilitator should bring a list of prepared questions and a printed map of the territory. During this debriefing, participants will identify the challenges they faced regarding land use, as well as the causes of those challenges. Key actors needed for resolution and potential solution ideas will also be discussed. The map serves as a visual aid to guide the discussion. Some basic questions that could be asked include:
- What happened during the game? How much, how quickly, and why did the soil degrade?
- What were the main conflicts that arose during the game? Between which actors?
- Did you find any solutions?
- Did you try to implement them? What was the outcome?
Of course, the questions can be more specific and adapted to the participants and the situations that arose during the game.
Enabling factors
-A trained moderator that also facilitated the game of the debate participants
-open atmosphere
-prepared questions and material (such as maps) for the debate
-knowledge of the facilitator in land use planning and risk management
Lesson learned
A structured approach—categorizing conflicts, problems, causes, and solutions— can help to break down the situation and identify solutions more effectively. For exemple, during the debriefing, different types of conflicts could be identified, such as agro-pastoral conflicts or disputes between farmers. For each type of conflict, various problems may be identified. In the case of an agro-pastoral conflict, one of the problems could be the dispersion of cattle, leading to the destruction of crops. For each problem, potential causes can be identified. Continuing with our example, one cause might be that the herd is not well managed. Finally, for each cause, ideas for resolving the conflict and identifying key actors should be proposed.
Impacts
The most significant impact of the game is that it support a progressive awareness-rising process for diverse stakeholders, by creating a safe space for different actors to identify and discuss conflicts related to land use and collaboratively seek solutions; through an iterative process where stakeholders firstly play in homogeneous groups and than mixed.
This tool is particularly useful to help communities in moving away from the ‘scapegoat’ approach to solve problems, the exchange and the proposals that emerge are key outcomes. From these discussions, ideas have arisen for awareness campaigns, exchange and monitoring systems, restriction bans, and more. The game not only raises participants' awareness of different outcomes and associated challenges, but it also helps to structure the various types of problems, making it easier to see the interconnections between them and work toward solutions.
Beneficiaries
The game can benefit to anyone participating and living or working in a zone prone to conflict around land use.
Sustainable Development Goals
Story
The story of Riccardo Pavesi:
I arrived in the community of Nanga-Eboko the first time in Autumn 2022 to facilitate a first multi-stakeholders assembly to which we wanted to introduce the idea of the Intercommunal platform that the project Forests4Future (funded by the BMZ, implemented by GIZ) was proposing to help the local communities to collaborate in the management of their natural resources.
The assemble was composed by farmers, herders, women and young people, community forests stewards, the villages’ chiefs, local authorities and representants of environmental and agriculture ministries.
At first, the idea we proposed was generally well accepted by the assembly but when we tried to discuss the main problems related to natural resources management in the region, the discussion escalate quite quickly and stakeholders begun accusing one each-other of negligence and to be responsible for this and that problem; e.g. the herders let cows destroy the crops, the farmers poison the cows, the traditional and local authorities are not supporting the needs of the communities etc.
In few minutes there was no more space for a safe and constructive discussion to agree on common solutions for the problems, the discussion was just focusing on who was guilty.
It was quite obvious that to solve this problem it was necessary to accompany the different actors to be more aware of the complex socio-environmental dynamics driven by the needs and responsibilities of each stakeholder.
To do this, the Forests4Future team identified the role-playing boardgame as an efficacious tool to: 1) create safe spaces for each stakeholder to discuss issues and 2) identify different stakeholders in the role of other stakeholders and enable each to understand the issues and needs of others and 3) identify solutions based on collaboration and mutual support.
The process of awarnes-rising and capacity building through the game lasted 6 months in which we moved to each village to conduct the game sessions with a representative group of each stakeholder.
At the end of this cycle we convened all stakeholders again in Yoko and Nanga-Eboko to organize the Intercommunal Platform and to discuss how to organize the future meetings.
It was quite noticeable that the atmosphere at these meetings had changed considerably, all participants could easily understand the issues of other stakeholders and were more willing to seek collaborative solutions to problems.
