skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Using games for social learning to promote self-governance
Governance of shared resources needs to overcome collective action problems. Relational values and decision-making play a critical role in this process. Approaches are needed to stimulate self-governance, taking relational values into account. We review the literature on the use of collective action games as a tool to stimulate social learning and self-governance. We emphasize the importance of legitimacy in decision-making and the risk of crowding out internalized motivations — for instance, based on relational values — with instrumental incentive mechanisms. We further highlight the need to include ecological outcome indicators in the game design to allow the activation of relational values. Our review concludes that games used as part of a set of participatory activities enable communities to come together to identify relevant problems and craft potential solutions.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2049553
PAR ID:
10480276
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Elsevier
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Volume:
62
Issue:
C
ISSN:
1877-3435
Page Range / eLocation ID:
101289
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, PLOS ONE)
    Zerriffi, Hisham (Ed.)
    We present the results of a hybrid research design that borrows from both experimental techniques—experimental games—and observational techniques—surveys—to examine the relationships between basic human values and exposure to natural ecosystems, on the one hand, and collective action for resource governance, on the other. We initially hypothesize that more frequent exposure to forests, and more pro-environmental values will be associated with more conservation action. However, we find that other values—tradition and conformity—are more important than pro-environmental values or exposure to nature. Our results imply that resource governance is likely to be more successful where resource users hold values that facilitate cooperation, not necessarily strong pro-environmental values. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, Ecology and Society)
    From communities rooted in place to transnational coalitions, this special feature applies concepts of collaborative care rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems to the field of environmental governance. We highlight restorative, liberatory practices rooted in caretaking ethics and reciprocal human-nature relations. Our approach also centers decision-making by those most connected to a given resource and the sustenance it provides. Despite global extraction, dispossession, and other colonial legacies, these efforts build towards collective action and community self- determination, both through formal policy change and informal practices. Three facets of collaborative care in environmental governance are threaded through the special feature: 1) care in place, 2) care in power, and 3) care in commoning. These themes connect both Indigenous-led and allied scholarship from the United States to the Netherlands, Japan to Madagascar, and Aotearoa to Canada. Though diverse in their interests and challenges, the authors and communities featured in this research build towards collective action and community self-determination in caring for the places that are the source of collective abundance. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)
    Evolutionary anti-coordination games on networks capture real-world strategic situations such as traffic routing and market competition. Two key problems concerning evolutionary games are the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium (NE) and the convergence time. In this work, we study these two problems for anti-coordination games under sequential and synchronous update schemes. For each update scheme, we examine two decision modes based on whether an agent considers its own previous action (self essential) or not (self non-essential) in choosing its next action. Using a relationship between games and dynamical systems, we show that for both update schemes, finding an NE can be done efficiently under the self non-essential mode but is computationally intractable under the self essential mode. We then identify special cases for which an NE can be obtained efficiently. For convergence time, we show that the dynamics converges in a polynomial number of steps under the synchronous scheme; for the sequential scheme, the convergence time is polynomial only under the self non-essential mode. Through experiments, we empirically examine the convergence time and the equilibria for both synthetic and real-world networks. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al (, Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining)
    null (Ed.)
    In anagram games, players are provided with letters for forming as many words as possible over a specified time duration. Anagram games have been used in controlled experiments to study problems such as collective identity, effects of goal setting, internal-external attributions, test anxiety, and others. The majority of work on anagram games involves individual players. Recently, work has expanded to group anagram games where players cooperate by sharing letters. In this work, we analyze experimental data from online social networked experiments of group anagram games. We develop mechanistic and data driven models of human decision-making to predict detailed game player actions (e.g., what word to form next). With these results, we develop a composite agent-based modeling and simulation platform that incorporates the models from data analysis. We compare model predictions against experimental data, which enables us to provide explanations of human decision-making and behavior. Finally, we provide illustrative case studies using agent-based simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of models to provide insights that are beyond those from experiments alone. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; (, Conservation Letters)
    ABSTRACT Incentives are a widely used tool for addressing deforestation and are often implemented as collective contracts. Local institutions are crucial to the solution of collective action problems associated with forest conservation, but we still have little knowledge of how to encourage institutional creation through policy. Since collective contracts do not eliminate freeriding incentives, we argue that their success hinges on their ability to stimulate the creation of institutions for collective action. To test these ideas, we analyze data from an incentivized lab‐in‐the‐field experimental collective action game played with natural resource users in four developing countries. The experiment simulates management of a common forest, and groups were randomly assigned to a conservation incentive payment condition. We observe how much group members attempt to coordinate on the creation of institutional rules and find experimental evidence that an external incentive program can stimulate the endogenous creation of informal institutions. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email