Speelman, Erika N

In sight of today’s large societal and environmental challenges, the governance of landscapes and the management of natural resources is increasingly complex. In this context, the interest for novel methods and tools to address this challenge continues to grow. There is substantial interest in serious games as boundary objects, tools to support (social) learning and stimulate collective action. On the other hand, scientific evidence about the type of impact serious games have in practice is often falling behind the method's ambitions. The majority of literature on serious games used in the context of natural resource management lacks objective impact assessment and therefore often remains anecdotal. How to move forward in assessing the impact of serious games remains a very important and debated topic in this transdisciplinary field. Here, we aim to further this current debate by bringing forth ideas for how to go about critical assessment of current initiatives and to propose a conceptualization of the role of serious games and impact assessment in moving issues through the issue-attention cycle.

Land-use changes and agricultural expansion practices are directly associated with deforestation, land degradation, and the subsequent consequences on water bodies. Understanding these practices and perspectives is necessary to develop policies for the sustainable management of the commons. However, in densely populated agricultural regions, the views of local communities remain poorly understood and their involvement in decision-making processes is limited. This study explored stakeholder perspectives in two Ethiopian lake ecosystems, Abaya-Chamo and Tana, using Q-methodology. The Q-sort analysis identified three discourses. The identified discourses were sustainable land-use, economic-centric pragmatism and agricultural expansionism. The sustainable land-use discourse, mainly advocated by experts and academics working in environmental conservation, indicates ecological concerns with socioeconomic considerations. Economic-centric is dominated by smallholder farmers from the Abaya-Chamo Basin, who prioritise economic gains and blame environmental conservation policies for their ineffectiveness. Smallholder farmers in the Tana Basin take a pragmatic approach to economic development by intensively using resources. There were distinctive opinions among the experts and smallholder farmers in the two basins. This indicates that managing lakes as commons requires participatory approaches that promote stakeholders' understanding and ownership and develop balanced strategies to address complex agroecological challenges, such as water hyacinth invasion.