Session 1. 1.

Participatory vision-building (PVB) seems promising in fostering collective action to overcome social dilemmas and attain socially desirable outcomes. By assisting the relevant actors in visualising their desired future and imagining how it would feel to be an active part, PVB can provide the necessary guidance, inspiration and motivation to galvanise collective action. Through a (pre-registered) framed lab-in-the-field economic experiment conducted with 728 farmers from Lake Tota, Colombia, we contribute to assessing whether PVB's causal impacts on collective action go beyond those of other elements of participatory processes that PVB also comprises, such as social interaction, information exchange and coordination around desirable strategies and outcomes. In a ‘lake game’, participants chose between two stylised farming practices over multiple hypothetical growing seasons, impacting their seasonal earnings and the water levels of a hypothetical lake as a shared resource. A subgroup of participants, randomly assigned to a PVB experimental condition, discussed and imagined a desired vision for the future. In this presentation, we discuss the potential of participatory approaches (such as the ‘lake game’ and the PVB treatment used in this study) to foster collective action, e.g. by raising awareness on social dilemmas, impacting relevant emotions such as inspiration, sadness and irritation and nurturing preferences for pro-social and pro-environmental action. We also indicate how future research could test the generalisability of our findings to other contexts, particularly those with heterogeneous interests, delve deeper into the underlying psychological mechanisms and explore the interplay of these aspects with other institutional mechanisms for sustaining collective action.

Experiential learning games are increasingly applied as participatory engagement tools to improve management of the commons, strengthen self-regulation of resource use and enhance constructive interaction of resource users. Pilot studies have shown that combining games with community debriefings and technical planning instruments can support institutional and behavioral change. Nevertheless, there is poor evidence on the potential of experiential learning games to achieve impact on a larger scale. We applied a package of experiential learning tools for groundwater management in 1779 communities in five states of India. As a largely invisible common pool resource, groundwater management requires effective coordination among users. In India, this coordination is still poor which is one explanation for half of all wells showing falling water tables. Our experiential learning interventions intended to improve water users’ system understanding, strengthen water related norms, support local water governance, and trigger sustainable water management behavior. A rigid impact assessment was conducted in 472 communities in Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Our results indicate that individuals who participated in the interventions more likely reported contributions to the maintenance of community water infrastructure. We also found that women more likely reported to participate in agricultural household decision making after playing the game. At the same time, we did not find the expected effect on knowledge, norm, and institutional change indicators. This challenges our theory of change which assumed that behavioral change follows understanding, norms and institutional change. Our results confirm the ability of experiential learning games to support collective action. At the same time, we see the need to better understand the mechanisms of how they trigger behavioral change, especially when being applied on a larger scale.

Rural communities worldwide face rapidly evolving and complex challenges, such as climate change. The current generation is challenged to balance its own needs with those of future generations and must decide how much to invest in adapting to climate change to secure the future. This highlights the key intergenerational dilemma at the heart of efforts to adapt to climate change. Addressing these challenges requires collective governance and innovative tools to enhance the same. This study examines whether a game combining the mechanisms of public good and dictator games framed as an intergenerational dilemma, along with a visioning workshop, can influence rural community members' perceptions of climate change, future generations, and self-efficacy. In the game, participants faced decisions that involved balancing resource use between immediate needs and future generations, simulating the trade-offs inherent in climate adaptation. The visioning workshop then facilitated discussions about long-term adaptation strategies.

Our intervention took place in 26 villages in the Zambezi region of Namibia, where participants were interviewed before or after the intervention. We conducted a follow-up survey eight months later to evaluate the persistence of the intervention’s effects. Outcomes were analyzed using ordinary least squares regression for continuous variables and multinomial analysis for categorical outcomes. Results indicate that participation in the intervention significantly increased self-efficacy, awareness of climate risks, and demand for climate change-related information. While pre-intervention participants displayed strong concern for long-term issues and future generations, the intervention broadened their focus to include both short- and long-term considerations, as well as a greater sense of responsibility toward both current and future generations. Eight months after the intervention, the overall effect of observed gains in self-efficacy remained significantly positive but weakened. Additionally, while risk awareness had decreased, the demand for climate information had increased. These findings affirm the value of experiential learning in strengthening cognitive outcomes that drive collective action, while suggesting that long-term behavioral change requires sustained engagement.

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.

We present results from a combined research + experiential learning intervention developed using the Netlogo-based FarmSquares platform, undertaken with farmers preparing to launch community-level ‘aggregate farms’ in Kisumu, Kenya under the One CGIAR ‘Nature+’ program. Our intervention incorporated a repeated discrete-choice experiment to identify shifts in stated preferences for different dimensions of risk and autonomy in farming that occurred in immediate response to game play, and a within-subjects comparison of incentive payments designed to i) encourage independent farming activity and ii) encourage collective farming activity. We present findings from a post-game debrief session in which players identified their own learning experiences from these comparative treatments, and any relevance they felt these experiences may have for them moving forward in their aggregate farms. Lastly, we discuss this novel FarmSquares platform, how it fits into the existing landscape of tablet-based games for conservation, and how this particular application handled the design tensions across the goals of games as research (standardizing framing information in order to observe differences in response to treatment) and games as experiential learning (making specific dilemmas salient as a means of enhancing critical thinking, discussion, and shifting perceptions).