Serious games to identify joint problems for scientists and stakeholders
In a paper recently published in Sustainability Science, Nicolas Salliou and colleagues introduce the use of serious game as a tool to support scientists and stakeholders to identify problems worth solving together. They used this novel approach in French and Swiss Alps.
Action-research is all about scientists trying to make useful their science by connecting it with real-world issues. However, participatory science is easier in theory than in practice. Building a common space legitimate for stakeholders and scientists to work together is rarely straightforward. Indeed, participatory research founds its legitimacy when traditional solution-finding procedures like political decisions or expert knowledge are falling short. While communities around the world are constantly facing all sorts of issues, how do we identify those which require more dedicated attention and a collaboration between scientists and stakeholder? This paper proposes to do so with the use of a co-designed serious game. This method allows for "a dive in complexity" with inhabitants who can play their territory and community. This tool open a meaningful discussion space to identify key areas that could necessitate a joint work and further meaningful action-research.
The article describes in particular how we mobilized this in the MtnPaths project that explored adaptation pathways for communities in the French and Swiss Alps.
For more details, the article is available in open source external pageherecall_made