TerriStories

THE APPROACH THAT THEY TALK ABOUT:
english version: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28uyd9_from-communities-to-policies_creation)
french version: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28rttd_du-terroir-au-pouvoir_creation

We often think of games as recreation for children. However, gaming is a serious learning method in terms of both designing innovations and sharing. This is what we and our Senegalese partners have experimented, with a view to let farmers draft themselves natural resource management policy. The novel participatory method we used combined role-play and simulation board games. It allowed farmers to design then test their own ideas of relevant innovations, with a view to ensuring sustainable development without any preconceived scientific or political ideas. The objective was to allow local know-how to be expressed, so as to derive original solutions suited to natural resource use in the uncertain climatic conditions of the Sahel.
Over five years, a muti-scale participatory platform (from a ComMod approach background) has been tested to help strakeholders in drafting themselves proposals of land policies. By combining role-play and simulation board games, farmers became enabled to test together, by "playing", their ideas for collective rules that would ensure sustainable use of natural resources and land. The platform can now be shared with national policy-makers, in the form of a computer "game" that analyses farmers' proposals and enables the insertion of new ideas. This computer version is also being used directly with farmers.
In Senegal, after five years of tests in a range of situations, the platform was transferred to civil society in 2014 in order to help them to confront to the challenge of a new land tenure reform. Six months after, the platform is in widespread use for developing dialogue with the State on land reform policy.