Social Dilemmas and Individual/Group Coordination Strategies in a Complex Rural Land-use Game
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Date
2011
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Abstract
"Strengthening ongoing bottom-up capacity building processes for local
and sustainable landscape-level governance is a multi-dimensional social endeavor.
One of the tasks involved participatory rural land use planning requires more
understanding and more awareness among all stakeholders regarding the social
dilemmas local people confront when responding to each others land-use decisions.
In this paper we will analyze and discuss a version of our game SIERRA SPRINGS
that is simple to play for any stakeholder that can count to 24, yet entails a complexcoordination
land use game with an extensive and yet finite set of solutions which
can mimic in a stylized form some of the dilemmas landowners could confront in
a landscape planning process where there livelihoods are at stake. The game has
helped researchers and players observe and reflect on the individual coordination
strategies that emerge within a group in response to these stylized dilemmas. This
paper (1) develops a game-theoretical approach to cooperation, competition and
coordination of land uses in small rural watersheds (2) describe the goal, rules and
mechanics of the game (3) analyzes the structure of each farms solution set vs. the
whole watersheds solution set (4) derives from them the coordination dilemmas
and the risk of coordination failure (5) describes four individual coordination strategies consistently displayed by players; mapping them in a plane we have
called Group-Level Coordination Space (6) discusses the strengths, limitations and
actual and potential uses of the game both for research and as an introductory tool
for stakeholders involved in participatory land use planning."
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Keywords
common pool resources, coordination game, rural affairs, land tenure and use