Serious games tackle serious challenges in the world’s complicated water systems
Serious games tackle serious challenges in the world’s complicated water systems
Serious games tackle serious challenges in the world’s complicated water systems
September 14, 2022
By Lynsi Burton, Marisa Escobar, Tania Santos Camilo, and Andrés González
Summary
A cornerstone of SEI's water planning work is to solicit the input of a wide variety of parties in a given watershed to help foster buy-in and understanding of newly developed water management plans.
In SEI's Water Beyond Boundaries work in Colombia's Campoalegre River basin last year, these serious games united people from all sectors and user perspectives in that watershed to help them formulate their new Integrated River Basin Management Plan, known as POMCA. The Campoalegre basin is a coffee production centre, also characterized by unequal land distribution, severe income inequality and disadvantaged conditions for Indigenous residents - and many struggle to access clean water and sewage.
Serious games offer a space where communities, authorities and government could generate consensus around the management, use and conservation of the basin.
"We use serious games to really help with participation process because people with different roles can talk together," said Tania Santos, research fellow at SEI Latin America.
"The formulation completely changed the way we approach different issues and guaranteed the participation of every person that represents each sector of the community." - José Vicente Villegas, president of the Campoalegre basin council The game enables residents and decision makers in a basin to understand the very technical nature of integrated water resource management and brings together different parties that otherwise may never have interacted and shared their perspectives - representatives from local communities, academia, hydropower, public services, business and more.
Because of the ongoing pandemic last year, Santos and González hosted the POMCA serious game sessions for the Campoalegre River basin remotely.
"Through an interactive and virtual strategy, we were able to participate and provide alternative solutions to multiple problems and needs from the point of view, knowledge and criteria of each participant." SEI's Water Beyond Boundaries initiative - in which serious games play a critical role for co-designing water policy - led to the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the national Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development.
Reference
Burton, L., Escobar, M., Camilo, T. S., & Gonzalez, A. (2022, September 14). Serious games tackle serious challenges in the world's complicated water systems. Retrieved September 22, 2022, from https://www.sei.org/featured/serious-games-water-systems/