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As resource users interact and impose externalities onto each other, institutions are needed to coordinate resource use, create trust, and provide incentives for sustainable management. Coordinated collective action can play a key role in enabling communities to manage natural resource commons more sustainably. But when such collective action is not present, what can be done to foster it? We contribute to the understanding of how experiential learning through games can affect behavioral change, potentially leading to more sustainable commons management. We present a conceptual framework describing the most important processes involved in experiential learning games. The framework highlights the importance of the game context for achieving game outcomes. We list game features that have been argued to influence learning and behavioral determinants, focusing on the game narrative and experience, game rules, and attributes of players. We briefly describe how each game feature influences the processes in the framework. Next, we apply the conceptual framework to examine design features that were particularly important for influencing behavioral drivers in commons management in three intervention cases from India relating to groundwater, surface water, and forests. Our conceptual reflections underpin the need to debate about underlying assumptions in using games as intervention tools. Making assumptions transparent can help to understand why or under what conditions experiential learning works or fails. There is a critical need for more systematic choices of the right tools for the right purpose. This includes participants of the experiential learning who must be able to relate the game to their real life. A social dilemma in the game should at least, in its basic structure, represent a real-life dilemma. We close by highlighting future research needs both from the conceptual behavioral change as well as the game design perspective.

Multistakeholder platforms (MSPs) are the subject of increasing attention and investment in the domain of collaborative natural resource governance, yet evidence-based guidance is slim on policy and investment priorities to leverage the MSP approach. We provide a comparative analysis of eight landscape-level MSPs spanning seven countries (Peru, Brazil, India, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and a cross-border case from Kenya and Somalia), representing a diversity of resource systems covering forests, rangelands, and multiuse agricultural landscapes. Applying an adapted social-ecological systems framework, our synthesis identifies the influence of these MSPs on patterns of stakeholder interaction and draws implications for the design and organization of MSPs that are both appropriate and effective. From the cases, we distill lessons addressing: (1) how to design an MSP in relation to the governance context, including the fit between institutional and ecological dimensions of the system and with attention to cross-scale linkages; (2) how to implement inclusive processes that address power inequities, including through capacity building and procedural rules; and (3) how to support adaptive learning to expand the MSP’s influence over time, including monitoring outcomes, adapting the scope of stakeholder engagement, and investing in MSP durability.

Institutional structures can fundamentally shape opportunities for adaptive governance of water resources at multiple ecological and societal scales. The properties of adaptive governance have been widely examined in the literature. However, there has been limited focus on how institutions can promote or hinder the emergence of adaptive governance. Elinor Ostrom's institutional theory stresses the importance of formal and informal norms and rules in effective governance of natural resources. Specifically, Ostrom's "design principles" (DPs) are considered important because they increase the capacity for adaptive decision making and facilitate the emergence of self-organization at smaller scales. Self-organizing agents can frequently modify rules-in-use, procedures, and technical methods to tackle changing ecological conditions and address significant management issues left by more traditional governments. In this study, we examine institutional arrangements for successful water governance by analyzing (1) the co-occurrence of DPs in irrigation systems, and (2) the combination(s) of DPs leading to social and ecological success. We collaborated with a local non-profit organization to review institutional records and conduct interviews in 50 irrigation communities in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in South India. Using qualitative comparative analysis, we found that the effectiveness of design principles is contingent on biophysical properties, such as the size of the watershed being governed, and attributes of the community, such as population size. We also discuss the methodological and data-related challenges involved in collecting primary data for conducting a context-specific institutional analysis. Our study offers a much-needed example of empirical research that investigates the role of operational level rules in adaptive water governance.

Climate change scenarios suggest largely detrimental impacts on agricultural production from a deterioration of renewable natural resources. Over the last 15 years, a new field of research has focused on the interactions between climate and conflict risk, particularly as it relates to competition over natural resources and livelihoods. Within this field, there has been less attention to the potential for resource competition to be managed in ways that yield greater cooperation, local adaptation capacity, social-ecological resilience, and conflict mitigation or prevention. The challenge of increasing social-ecological resilience in small-scale agriculture is particularly acute in the socioeconomically and agroecologically marginalized Western Highlands of Guatemala. Not only is climate change a threat to agriculture in this region, but adaptation strategies are challenged by the context of a society torn apart by decades of violent conflict. Indeed, the largely indigenous population in the Western Highlands has suffered widespread discrimination for centuries. The armed conflict has left a legacy of a deeply divided society, with communities often suspicious of outsider interventions and in many cases with neighbors pitted against each other. We use the example of the Buena Milpa agricultural development project to demonstrate how grassroots approaches to collective action, conflict prevention, and social-ecological resilience, linking local stakeholder dynamics to the broader institutional and governance context, can bear fruit amidst postconflict development challenges. Examples of microwatershed management and conservation of local maize varieties illustrate opportunities to foster community-level climate adaptation strategies within small-scale farming systems even in deeply divided societies.

Groundwater is a common-pool resource that is subject to depletion in many places around the world as a result of increased use of irrigation and water-demanding cash crops. Where state capacity to control groundwater use is limited, collective action is important to increase recharge and restrict highly water-consumptive crops. We present results of field experiments in hard rock areas of Andhra Pradesh, India, to examine factors affecting groundwater use. Two nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) ran the games in communities where they were working to improve watershed and water management. Results indicate that, when the links between crop choice and groundwater depletion is made explicit, farmers can act cooperatively to address this problem. Longer NGO involvement in the villages was associated with more cooperative outcomes in the games. Individuals with more education and higher perceived community social capital played more cooperatively, but neither gender nor method of payment had a significantly effect on individual behavior. When participants could repeat the game with communication, similar crop choice patterns were observed. The games provided an entry point for discussion on the understanding of communities of the interconnectedness of groundwater use and crop choice.

This paper presents a comparative study of forest management across four countries in East Africa and Latin America: Kenya, Uganda, Bolivia, and Mexico. It focuses on one question: Do varying proportions of women (low, mixed, high) in forest user groups influence their likelihood of adopting forest resource enhancing behavior? We found that higher proportions of females in user groups, and especially user groups dominated by females, perform less well than mixed groups or male dominated ones. We suggest that these differences may be related to three factors: gender biases in technology access and dissemination, a labor constraint faced by women, and a possible limitation to women's sanctioning authority. Mixed female and male groups offer an avenue for exploiting the strengths of women and men, while tempering their individual shortcomings.