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The role- playing game model called BUTORSTAR simulates the impacts of reedbed management and creates awareness to students on socioeconomic factors.

Simulations and games implemented in natural resource management (NRM) are useful for decision making and training.

Byline: Patrick d|Aquino, Christophe Le Page, Francois Bousquet, Alassane Bah The increasing diversity of stakeholders, who often hold differing and conflicting land-use perceptions and strategies, underlines the growing need for innovative methods and tools to support a negotiation process aimed at an enhanced and more decentralised land-use management policy. Land-use management is a complex issue and thus presents an irreducible uncertainty that entails a variety of legitimate perspectives. Due to this complexity, the decision-making process should be incremental, iterative and continuous. This means that the acts of decision making will always be imperfect but will move progressively closer towards a shared satisfactory resolution. However, which tools will best fit such a theoretical starting point? Our team is seeking to develop an innovative form of participatory modelling fitting these hypotheses. As regards regional planning, a novel way to put these assumptions into practice has been under way since 1997 in the Senegal River Valley. This experiment, called 'SelfCormas', is being conducted to test a directed self-designing of modelling tools, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) by stakeholders and principals. From the initial stages, as little prior design work as possible is executed by the modellers. The process has been organised in the form of participatory workshops, including role-playing games, to support a local decentralisation policy at an operational level (2,500 km2). This sort of accompaniment leads to discussions, appraisals and decisions concerning the planning of land-use management. Just a few months after the first workshops, this process has already culminated in autonomous applications, from local to regional levels.

Background and Aim. It is often assumed in natural resources management that communication helps with solving the ‘tragedy of the commons’ by way of shared knowledge and better coordination. ReHab is a role-playing game, both cooperative and competitive, exploring the role of knowledge production and communication for the conservation and management of natural resources through experiential learning.Method. ReHab pitches players as Harvesters or Rangers in an abstract landscape representation where a resource is distributed in discrete units of Biomass. The landscape is also a nesting and breeding ground for a protected migratory Bird. The Rangers’ task is to maximize Bird reproduction by creating protected areas, while Harvesters have to collect Biomass. Rules about biomass regeneration, distribution amongst harvesters, and bird reproduction are not disclosed to the players. A typical game session includes two successive scenarios: No communication between players, followed by open communication. A final debriefing session with all players focuses on eliciting a common understanding of the hidden rules, as well as the influence of individual or collective strategies on scenario outputs. The analysis includes records from 45 sessions played since 2008.Results. Our results show that in most cases communication improves the outcomes for both roles, Harvesters and Rangers, even though players construct and articulate rational decisions based on limited or even flawed understandings of the rules. In the absence of enforcement mechanisms, trust and communication prevail over knowledge and understanding when it comes to managing natural resources and resolving trade-offs between conservation and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many conservation scientists, interdisciplinarity and participation can be efficient in the management of biodiversity. For both methods, new tools and new participative processes such as the so-called “co-modeling process” are required. The key questions addressed in this article are how group dynamics shape the model and why certain perspectives dominate in a process designed to be democratic. It is necessary, therefore, in order to appreciate the design and the legitimacy of the model that has been co-constructed, to address the questions of both the stakeholders' interests and their status in the process. Our case study is a co-modeling program based in a French biosphere reserve. It enabled us to highlight the key role of the mediator who had to govern social relationships and translate disciplinary jargon into a common technical language through a list of co-modeling rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This position paper contributes to the debate on perspectives for simulating the social processes of science through the specific angle of participatory research. This new way of producing science is still in its infancy and needs some step back and analysis, to understand what is taking place on the boundaries between academic, policy and lay worlds. We argue that social simulation of this practice of cooperation can help in understanding further this new way of doing science, building on existing experience in simulation of knowledge flows as well as pragmatic approaches in social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the methodology developed to collect, understand and merge viewpoints coming from different stakeholders in order to build a shared and formal representation of the studied system dealing with groundwater management in the low-lying atoll of Tarawa (Republic of Kiribati). The methodology relies on three successive stages. First, a Global Targeted Appraisal focuses on social group leaders in order to collect different standpoints and their articulated mental models. These collective models are partly validated through Individual Activities Surveys focusing on behavioural patterns of individual islanders. Then, these models are merged into a single conceptual one using qualitative analysis software. This conceptual model is further simplified in order to create a computer-assisted role-playing game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]