Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Nils Ferrand: Okay. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I’d like to thank Arizona State University under the School of Sustainability for inviting me during these two weeks. It’s my second time here in Phoenix. I was here two years ago for the Resilience Conference, where I was also invited as a keynote, dealing with some question regarding viability. Today, as Sandra introduced, I will try to explain to you some processes. We actually supervise—not so much supervise, but accompany in Africa. Please forgive my accent. I do speak English, but with this very strange accent sometimes, so please don’t hesitate to interrupt me if anything is not clear.

I start with a small movie, a very short one. I hope the sound will be working, which is actually showing you the vision of someone in Africa who was a very important partner, about the use of [inaudible]. It doesn’t matter, you don’t need to read stats. The interview right after is short, just tells you some vision.

[Video played]

My friend, Clovis, was speaking here [inaudible] University, which is a very strange university. It’s a community university, which has been settled by the community there in Uganda, west of Uganda ,the Renza Ramontaine. For those who are interested, it’s one of the most important place for gorillas and chimps worldwide. I show you the next stage actually, if the computer accepts to do it. I’m not sure it does now. Does it work? No, I can’t get the second movie. Let me check. This is the first one, okay, it doesn’t matter. The next one was showing actually the implementation in the village and the community.

I can show it later to some person who is interested. I just wanted to show an example of this implementation to give you a first idea of what we are speaking about now. We are speaking of groups of stakeholders, of all levels, farmers, municipality officer, district officers, technical bodies, parliamentarians, ministers, using these kinds of game and platform to deal with real issues. This is in South Africa. The person around the table are the catchment management officers in South Africa. This one is in Mozambique, also dealing at the pretty eye level with water management issues. This is again South Africa.

It’s a multi-level process with people from either farmers’ community or natural park managers. This one is in Ngami, in Niger, Niger is west of Africa and it is dealing with an Ivory Coast case study where the water flows down to Yamoussoukro, the capital of Ivory Coast. This is dealing with the Niger Delta. Do you know the Niger Delta? It is a very large delta in Western Africa, which is absolutely critical. You may know, or not know, that there is a wall there now in Mali, where the French and the American, we simply are engaged. This is another one dealing with the same case, and this is in Bamako by the way.

These people are building model for the management issues, using the game and using computer models and data to calibrate the game. These are the recent implementation, why Clovis, my fried, was speaking about implementation. He was preparing this phase, which is very recent. These pictures are less than two months old. In Uganda, we have now a large social extension of this process, which is taken by many, many leaders in communities among farmers. It’s being used for dealing with very serious issues of natural resource management, but for the needs of survival of these people in time of food and livelihood.

This is the game you do have in this table right here, which is called “Pung Game,” because there the local river is called the Pungwe River. That’s the introduction, and these people, they are actually the district officers. They are the equivalent of regional manager, and they were actually using also the game, and discovering the potential use of the game for policy making, during a different session. Of course, the situation is different. You see it in the room. The other one was outside, but basically, they do play the same game. Okay, so where are we going to in this presentation? I’m sorry, but this presentation is from a pretty research side.

I didn’t know what kind of audience I would have, so I want to be clear that most of it is oriented to research or intervention research. The first idea is that you can bring people to be a model about their situation. This is true all over the world. We do that all over the world with people, bring them around the table. Take some time to discuss and reflect about the local situation, about resources which are used, can be space, can be energy, can be water, can be soil, etcetera. It can do and build something about their situation. You can use this model for two different things, for planning. Planning is building strategies.

The second one is to build games, and these games are used for people to sit down and think about the future in a practical manner. Most of you know games, because either you may play some games yourself, or your kids may play some games, etcetera. Games are also useful and we come back to that later. Games have been used for long, long by the military forces, for training forces and management, it’s been used in management itself, for business, training, etcetera. Games are not only for fun. You can have fun and also do serious things with games. What is important for us is games are used as laboratories for strategies.

That means that making these games, using these games, you can test strategies with people. When I say “you,” I mean basically the stakeholders, the people from the different countries and places. A very key idea is the idea that the game is being designed by the group themselves. If you do your game, it’s a way of expressing your vision of your environment and your problem. If you use this game later with other people around the table, you can interact about the conflicts, about the different issues which are appearing and how you can overcome problems or cope, for instance, with climate change.

What is important for us as scientists, of course, is the idea that this process is a way of integrating values kind of knowledge, which can be scientific knowledge, coming from science and technology, and also lay people knowledge, what everybody knows about the environment, and this is very important. In this case, we are dealing with ways of rationalizing sustainable management or sustainable development, and dealing with complexity, because we are dealing with different issues. While the context of what I’m showing now is inside a European project, Europe has been funding a research project for many decades now.

This is one of those instances of this European project in what is called Framework Program. It’s associating different partners from different places, from Europe and from Africa. We do work in five area in Africa. We work in Tunisia, in the south of Tunisia in a pretty deserted area. We work in Malia Inola Delta, although these days, it’s kind of difficult because this is the war now exactly there. We still go and working inside the welcome text there. We work in the Ethiopia, in the north Ethiopia, the Blue Nile source of Ethiopia, this is Lake Tana. We work in—we’re going down in Renziara and we work in the Drakensberg grassland area of South Africa with different partners.

Our aim generally is to provide new efforts for natural resource management or integrated natural resource management in these places, and to test them operationally at different levels of society, and be sure that they are actually contributing to real change. It’s not research for research, it’s research for change. There are some research issues which are critical for us. The first one, well, this is inside science. The first issue is the fact that, for many scientists in the field of social environmental management or social environmental research, or research in the ecosystem and biodiversity, the focus is put on the production of scientific papers of increasing knowledge, etcetera.

It’s a pretty split over set of people. It’s pretty difficult to get a real disciplinary integration. The first issue we have here is this integration. Integration led by the needs of the stakeholders, led by the actual operational expectation. That is very important for us. The second one is this notion of multi-level participatory planning. It means what? It means that if you take a group of people here in Phoenix, everywhere in the world, everybody has ideas about what should be done, proper of action. Okay, options, well, if you take all of that, plus the technical groups, demonstration, the managers, etcetera, everybody has set of proposal for what should be done to improve the general situation.

If you gather all of that, you get a very big set of proposal, which are not coherent, which are not all feasible, and which certainly don’t contribute as a whole to sound integrated policy. There is some work to be done to aggregate and integrate that, and that is something we work on. Then, we are interested in building the right model with people to test these strategies, and especially being able to reflect and help people reflecting on the effect of different strategies. Some strategies, for instance, are very expensive in term of public money, others are not. It’s not always of use that the most expensive strategy is the most interesting idea, and that is the kind of thing we can try doing, testing.

The last issue is critical for science. We need evaluation, we need monitoring and evaluation. It’s useless doing things without knowing what we do. We need to measure the outcomes and the effects of the different process. Well, I told you it’s a scientific presentation, so I’m referring to some scientific background, but I don’t go very much in detail. If you’re interested, I can give you more references. Basically, we are referring to a very large group of researchers worldwide, inside a movement of research called “Companion Learning,” which is more than 15 years old, and which is dealing with supporting communities in change, using this kind of approach of modeling with people and using role-playing games with people.

Meanwhile, we do have interaction, especially for the last two years. We have pretty high-scale programs of the United Nations. The United Nations have established a new office in Korea called UN Office for Sustainable Development, which is in charge of assisting countries and developing their sustainability development policies. We’ve worked together on protocols for planning, which would be in favor of good management in term of sustainability development. The next issues is about multi-level governance processes. Most of you are active in your city or your environment.

You certainly have things to say. The engagement of people is in critical issue worldwide. The question of how you can combine the different political level to work together is a critical issue. When I came two years ago to make a representation at a resilience conference in Plenary, that was about the notion of shared room. Having the cities and the managers and the policymakers in the same room, interacting to build strategies and implement strategies. The last issue is about using computers. I have a background in computers and at official interventions, actually was not far from here 20 years ago in Santa Fe, in the Santa Fe Institute, working with the initial development of artificial life and stuff like that, which are very far from there.

There are some commonalities, and now, the question is to which extent we actually need computers to help improving the world in general. That’s not clear, that’s not clear, I must say. I don’t want to go into details, just to show you that to implement this question and go for that, in Africa, we have what is called an operational framework, which is series of action. There is a kind of cooking recipe, a way of overcoming problems and dealing with different questions. For instance, of course, you have pretty classical framework for decision report, where you have an assessment phase where you try to know from where you start baseline stuff, etcetera. Then, you have assessment of possible options, and basically, you ask people, “Okay, what should we do?”

Okay, then you try to document that with the people, because when any of you would say, “In my vicinity, in my district, we should do that,” well, you have some ideas of a requirement. Maybe there are some financial requirements, but there are some space requirements. You would expect others to do something, etcetera, so there are several requirements. There is a rationale why you are proposing that. IT’s the same everywhere in the world. When people propose actions, they know something about the needs and something about the expecting fact. We do work on that. Now, you gather all these bricks when you want to build this new house, and there are on the shelf and now you have to select the right bricks—they have to select the right bricks and start building the house.

Of course, you want the bricks to fit one with the other, and at the end, you want the house to be fully built and nice. That’s the challenge. There are several tools to do that. The tools we do use are pretty simple from a scientific point of view, because they are very robust and transposable worldwide. We did use them in many context. We have something which is a protocol. You don’t need to go into detail. The idea is that there is this cooking recipe, how do you do that, the whole way of organizing it? Then, there is what we call an action model. An action model is actually what I told you, is that if you say while we should improve security in our surroundings for the kids when they go to school, you have an idea of how it should be done.

This is an action, and you are able to describe this proposal of action. You say, we need to do that, that and that, and we expect to get that. This is an action model. You can do that for building irrigation system. You can do that for developing education. You can do that for coordinating people, all that are proposal of action, which can share the same model. Now, you can integrate, and for instance, people here in this picture work on very big wallpaper. They put all the actions and they start thinking on how much they can actually do it together, what are the constraint, is it feasible, is it current? Where are we going with that?

This is fully explored based. It’s only based on the ideas that people are able to interact, and of course, you can bring in some expert to say, “But it doesn’t work. Sorry, guys.” You are misthinkng the problem. Here, there are some problems and that’s very important in this interaction of combining this age with the scientific knowledge. The final one is one of the main problem worldwide with policy is implementation. In all countries in the world, we do have several very nice policy in the text. Going down to the field and getting it implemented is the real challenge. We do work on the next stage, which is when you have a policy, how will you do it? How will you do it means what?

It means who is doing what, when, where, how, with which money? You have to deal with all these details, and that is something we bring them to consider. Basically, we have two tools. The first tool is about planning, it’s called co-plan and it’s a very simple tool. Nothing fancy really, but very robust and proven by usage tools. Then, we have a tool kit, which is called “What a Game”, which allows you to build games. All of that is free, open source. You can disseminate worldwide. We don’t have any commercial asset in that. My ideas about games now. Games have been used for changing water policy and water management for quite long now.

I am giving example, which are not from our team. This is in Thailand. This is people who are using 3-D models, 3-D markup of the place, with people to explore new ways of management. The 3-D markup is made with the people, it’s built with the people. This is part of the process to make it with them, so that they actually project into the environment. This one is a very large wooden board for irrigation system, which has been developed by a guy called Bruce Langford from the University of Eastern England UK. Bruce has been working in irrigation for long, and he has been working in irrigation conflicts. You may know that in irrigation, irrigation is universal first.

Everywhere you have water issues, that’s some irrigation. He’s been developing this one for helping people to discuss conditions for sharing water in irrigation schemes, in irrigation that works. It’s a very efficient and interesting kind of game. What is important in all these games which are played is that, of course, they are played with realistic orders. Keep in the mind the idea that sometime, it is very interesting to switch roles. For instance, if you are upstream, a catchment means that you live in the upper part of the catchment. Some people are living downstream. Of course, whatever you do upstream in the river has an impact in the people living downstream.

What we tend to do sometimes in the games, of course, is to switch roles, is to put the people who live downstream in the situation of the world living upstream, and conversely, so that it can realize what are the real problem users are facing. What are games, this platform we have been developing for some years. It’s a free, open source platform, which is a set of very simple elements, and I am showing you some parts of it. You see nothing fancy. “What a Game”is a set of charts, like this one, which, well, actually, this is a very simple version, it’s called Any Work, where you can use them to build your own model, your own catchment representation.

It’s a Lego, okay, really a Lego. You draw your own. If you’re interested, we can do it later together. You can use it to explore action. If I do that, that and that in this catchment, what happens? What we do to make it realistic and interesting is that we do represent the key resources. Here, in Arizona State University, you have a wonderful [inaudible] which she is the one of Amy Nostrom. Amy Nostrom got a Nobel Prize for dealing with the management of common perusals. Common perusals is a set of critical resources that people need to achieve their living generally. We do represent the problem of common perusals. Physically, we have set off numbers, you see.

This is the problem. The most important movement worldwide for everything dealing with the conflict and management is grabbing. If you have got something like that, everyone around the table is about to, in the end, to grab part of the resource. This is where policy starts, because then you have to organize regulation for people to share this problem of grabbing. I need it, you need it, we have to share. Then, you start inventing policy, and that is what we try to do physically with the game and this process. Okay, I don’t go very much into detail. Just keep in mind the fact that by having this physical, the fact that we are this bowl with the marbles or the pebbles in that is important.

This gesture of people around the table sitting and trying to get it, and discussing about getting it, is important. We are not speaking of computers and something which is far. When we deal with the reality of livelihood of people, the fact that they have to make their living by cropping, or simply going to work and getting enough energy to be able to make that business, etcetera, this is something very tangible and concrete. We want to keep it tangible and concrete for most of the people. Okay, I don’t want to go into detail. We’ve been doing that in many places, mainly in Europe and Africa. We have some instances in Korea. There are some people working in South America.

I don’t know most of the detail because it’s open source. Sometimes people are doing it and taking it. When we do it, it can be—this is the same case, but with different groups. They do different things. They use it differently. Ultimately, they can enrich all together issues related to governance and management, but they won’t do exactly the same. Our problem now, okay, I am finished now with this introduction to the game. You have a vision of Lego stuff with which you can build a model, use it to play with the people. Okay, point one. Now, let’s pick a bit of planning. Planning for sustainable development, planning for integrated management.

The problem we have is to support the stakeholders in designing, validating, so make it reasonable in implementing, very complex action plan. This is in front of external change scenario. Of course, there is climate change, but that’s not the most important most of the time. Most of the time, the key problem people are facing is the price of commodities and goods in the international market. Like when we work in Uganda, a large part of these people try as much as possible to sell cocoa. I can tell you that some of these farmers who were illiterate and told me all the details of the functioning of the cocoa market in America.

They knew it just because it was important for them. We are not speaking of something so far. Actually, there are some relations. Okay, this is something I like to refer to as a problem of building a new bicycle. Everybody knows what a bicycle is, especially here. It’s impress here in this place, because you have so many bicycles around, which is not so common in US. This is different from the other place of US here. You know what is a bicycle here. Now, if you address a specific problem, there are several case studies of we are dealing with bicycle, a very formal technical one. Then, you have the very practical approach, where for instance, organize also a very active in bicycle, but you can use the bicycle to hold 400 kilos of [inaudible] on the bicycle and it works fine. Bicycles is interesting ‘cuz it’s universal.

Then, you have tool kits, okay, you have components and elements. Then, you can start thinking about specific situations. This is European congestion problem, most probably in the Netherlands or Germany, where you have congestion inside a train, a commuting train, or this is a parking place and you have to deal with this. How should you do? Then, you have some indicators, looking at you want something to be of course nice, cheap. Then, you imagine that you want something valuable, and you start making your plan. You can make an integrated plan, and finally, you have what we call an implementation, which is the making.

This whole series of process of design, which is an engineering problem. It’s the one we are facing in general for the sustainability of plan. When you deal with either a large scale, for what is called an NSDS, National Sustainability Development Strategy, which is as being fostered by the UN since the Rio Conference with limited success, but nevertheless, or Agenda 21, maybe in some other place where you live, you’ve heard about Agenda 21. There are some instances, and it’s pretty much the same, you have all these referential, you have some tools, while you can make some, I don’t know, winter, you can use alternative cropping system or you can use irrigation, etcetera, these are tools.

Then, you have indicators and you come to the very famous triple bottom line of system development, which you have to deal with, working at the real situation, what do you want to do? Environmental impact assessment, you have probably heard of environmental impact assessment, and it can start working throughout the integrated plan and making an implementation. The problem is pretty much the same. What are the criteria for us in terms of a good strategy? Well, first, we have a very serious problem, which is from a scientific point of view, critical. It is the fact that if you take the different disciplines for the different elements of a strategy, someone is about building dikes, someone is about improving the irrigation change.

Another one is about agronomy and changing crops, another one is about education, economic instrument. All of them are of their own assessment criteria and dimension. Now, if I want to make the assessment of a global plan, I’m facing a problem because I have no aggregation rule for the different assessments. There is, in a way, a problem of reinventing a global assessment for this kind of strategy. It’s something we are blessed to work on, and it’s sometime not so simple, because really, the where, how, the different domains are looking at different. If you are an engineer and you are used to building in construction, the way that you consider that you did a good job is very different from the one of an economist, for instance, or someone who is dealing with education or someone who is dealing with the improvement of cropping systems.

We tried to find the neutrality of that, and what we are doing with that is what is called the procedural approach. The procedural approach is ultimately we don’t believe practically that we can have universal indicators. Most of our societies like very much indicators. Indicators are a way of simplifying policy making, of simplifying vision and problems. Fortunately, when you tend to simplify, you tend to increase the problem and reduce the singularity. Also, societies are diverse and singular, and we need that. Basically, the way of dealing with that is to procedural approaches, which is how you bring people to elaborate and discuss on the quality of strategies.

Finally, we tend to look at two different things. The first one is the procedural conditions for strategy, what do we mean with this big word. We simply mean that the way how a strategy is built is as important as the result. If some experts come to your neighborhood and put on the table a strategy and tell you, “This is what you will do. You will not like it, because you have not been included in the process. You called [inaudible] how it’s been attained,” etcetera. There are some possible drawbacks. Of course, our personal condition for improvement, which includes dealing with currency and feasibility, inclusion of stakeholders. The fact that we deal with the possibility of implementing it, it is very nice to have sufficient strategies to improve the transport system in metropolitan area.

If you can’t implement it, you have a problem, so we have to deal with that. That’s part of the procedural condition. Then, of course, you have the intrinsic assessment of the strategy, a basic one, for instance, being the cost. We like very much zero cost strategies. We tend to work very often at one stage in the process on zero cost strategies. Well, zero cost doesn’t mean anything actually. When we say zero cost, we mean zero financial cost, direct financial cost. When you do something, it has always a cost in term of changing, in term of investing activities or labor, in terms of consuming soil or other natural resources. Nevertheless, it’s important to look at that.

Then, robustness, robustness of the strategy, what we tend to do when we have enough time and energy is that we put the groups of stakeholders in front of adverse scenarios, bad stories, you know. Well, in this country, they can tell you that you can imagine very easily many bad stories, because this country, I am speaking for instance of Ghana, it is the same, where war is really close all the time. Ghana is just getting out of civil war. There is a [inaudible] out there, I do work there. We’ve got a [inaudible] and are ready to flee kind of areas because of the [inaudible] which is one of the most dangerous virus worldwide, etcetera.

It is very easy to invent a difficult situation, and they do face them. It’s important because then you are triggering the limits of the strategy. People can think and reflect about these limits. Now, how can we test finally a strategy? That’s where we introduce the game. You see, we’ve been traveling. I tried to explain to you about these games, and then about the question of building strategies and how we do that. Now, there are different ways of doing it. The basic idea of testing a strategy is to see if all the thinking you made before with the people, plus the experts, was right. The best way would be, of course, just to do it

The ideal way of testing a strategy is to do it. Well, it exists, it has a name. When you make experimental policy, this is exactly what is done. Sometime, especially for instance in the health sector, there are some experiments which can last for one or two years, in some specific conditions which are controlled by which different way of dealing with health system or Social Security, whatever, is tested with monitoring and evaluation. We can’t do that, in most other case, because the time as such you would deal with that you can’t. That’s where we introduced the game as a laboratory for testing the strategy.

While the process is pretty straightforward, the stakeholders must know how to use the game. They would play some rounds of the game without the strategy, which is business as usual situation, just to get into the normal way of dealing. Then, you can start introducing your strategy, in this case, weave them. It’s a great process because testing your strategies, either you bring your strategy from outside. I tell you what happens most of the time is that people are inventing their strategy in the way, while using the game to do step-by-step introduce new action.

Most of the time, we don’t refrain them from proposing action or intervention. It’s part of the normal process. Now, particularly I give you an example of these steps. This is in a and that was the first phase, where you were having local stakeholders working together on the game and the strategy. They were doing the two elements at the same time. As you may see here, we are working at a first stage, with intermediary group. After that, later, actually recently in the last two months, the same process was repeated with larger community in Ethiopia, that was the first phase, where we wanted these people would become a facilitator of the process, to learn and discover the whole process.

They were working on strategy, you see again this big metrics, which is the integration metrics for strategy. This is game design and this is implementation strategy. Then, you have all this phase with stakeholders. In this case, it’s in Uganda, where you have the participatory planning process. For instance, in Uganda, the group of stakeholders that worked on strategy planning worked for three and a half days. It was a group of 24 participants, plus the external facilitators locally. They have proposed, this blackboard, and this lady is actually a high-level policymaker. She is a level five officer. On this blackboard, they have proposed action, and they have proposed in this case close to 50 different actions.

They are the bricks. So they started using the bricks and making the strategy using these bricks. Then, the game, the design, and here are some instances of the game for this process in [inaudible ] for the five countries. This is, in this case, a pretty expensive process, in terms of time, because we wanted to fully transfer capacity to the local partners. It means that by no way we worked as concerned, doing the job for the local stakeholders. We worked more, by transferring knowledge and capacity to local people who would become actually facilitators for the game design. All the people there were coming from the different countries, and learning how to build the games.

This is making a nice design community, which is technically called a community of practice. All the stations where we’ve been working all together with the different representatives, people from all the places, and here you have Uganda and Egyptian people working together. There are some people from Mali and some people from Tanzania, sharing the same issues and problem. Well, finally, how do we do a game? How do we build a game? There are some steps, which are covering more of this notion of remodeling. You find them in other methods. For some of you who may have done something like participatory mapping or using cognitive mapping techniques, you find the same commonalities. What is different is for the [inaudible].

Basically, we look at the map. I ask you how is your neighborhood, how are the things organized, where are the business, where are the different resources which are used, where do you take your water, etcetera. This is special mapping with the people. Then, you start asking people, what are the resources which you use? Well, okay, we use soy, we use energy, we use water, we use power, because we consume some power to get decisions made. We use information and all that, etcetera, and we use money. Then, we make an assessment of the actors, so who is using these resources, who are the stakeholders?

Who are the stakeholders of your system? Then, you come to an administration which you start being able to describe, and you can build a prototype. This is not a prototype, this is a final version. It’s been reproduced by many, but you saw some pictures of prototypes. You can use the prototypes to test, and then you improve and you go on working like that with the game. This process can be supported by computer. You see the difference here, that we do use computers for designing the game. We don’t use computers for the game itself. Of course, we have databases, where we do have information about the actions and tools now which we use.

We have an online system, which is very [inaudible] for facilitating that, while you can use. Most of the time, we actually use very simple Excel sheets to produce the game. This is an action card on this game. You see, for instance, this was an operational one in Uganda. It’s having very simple information, a name, a picture and some few information. It’s the same as this one, and other context, this is Hungary. Well, this is how we support the design process, actually. Finally, we come to the point of having the game. We want it to be coherent. What does it mean to be coherent? The fact that on one side, if you followed me, we have the planning, on one side we have the game.

The game is there to help distinguish strategy, the plan. Well, the whole thing must be coherent. It is why, because basically, all the actions which are in the game set, which are offered to people like, “I want to test charcoal burning,” and here we have got a piggery, and here we’ve got vegetables growing, etcetera. They are present in a strategy, okay, and they are also present in the game process. Of course, we do have the reference action for the normal situation, and this is the second set of card, which is when you go out of business as usual, and you start needing the strategy, the people have proposed to make different things.

We have got them in the second set of action, and then they can start trying to, like improving sanitation, like conservation methods of farmings, like hole sitting, like planting trees along riverbanks. Okay, these are the additional action set, which is proposing a new strategy. There are compatible. Well, these are the prototypes, I was speaking of prototypes. I should have put these before, but you see different prototypes, with drawings, which are manually made. We spend much time cutting paper and drawing on paper, so your different prototypes you as some elements. All of them are prototypes, and then you have the final versions.

These are the final versions, which are operational. This is the games, this is this one, used in Uganda. This is the game in Ethiopia, in the Fogera region, with the people in Ethiopia using it. This is a game of Mali, which are the final operational version. Now, I’m coming to my conclusion. While at first, there are several issues which are open in term of the game. The first one is about computer or not computer. Of course, we don’t use computer, particularly there is no black box. A black box is something which is mysterious and you don’t know what happens inside. Well, when you do the game, everything is on the table, no black box.

It’s clear for everybody what is in the game. There are some discussion, nevertheless, but everything is accessible. We do use calibrated model. It means that when I take one water marble in my game, whatever, it has a meaning. One of this marble would represent 10,000 cubic meters. We know it’s 10,000 cubic meter. This green one here is representing [inaudible] biodiversity. That’s more difficult. I mean, if you ask all experts in ecological conservation or people who are doing ecological inventory, well, continuation of what is biodiversity is a worldwide challenge. I can’t tell you exactly what each of these marbles represent for [inaudible].

We do our best to have something which was reasonable in calibration. The reason why we need is that we don’t want something which is incoherent. If I take the card of making lettuce, and if I take the card of making banana, I want water consumption, which is presented in the two cards, to be reasonable. I don’t want them to be perfectly accurate, but I don’t want, for instance, the order of magnitude of the needs to be mismatched. It has to be reasonable. People look at that and say, “Okay, yeah, it’s like that.” We have some negotiation about, for instance, the pollution by banana growing in this case, and that’s an issue I’ve been working, of course, in Western Kansas.

I have long discussion with people about compared consumption of water, of normal, flat-housing like the one you have in Phoenix, in real to condominium housing, etcetera, because it’s a complex problem, because the advantage of condominium is higher, although the individual consumption is lower. At the end, you have to deal with real number and check how it compares in space, for instance. Well, a very important and interesting issue, of course, is this question of the capacity of groups to adopt this modeling and gaming posture about serious issues. Do you think in your real life, with the political people around your social environment, you could use games?

No, yes, I don’t know. I’ve used games with ministers in many countries, I can tell you. I’ve used games with all levels of society. I have very often got serious people from science and technology, who didn’t want to go in the process initially, and they realize that all the rest of society was going, but not them. Then, of course, the station did change, but it’s a challenge. Of course, the background about games is different. There are some societies where they’re used to play, and some societies which are not used to play. Nevertheless, many societies do play. You know they are anthropologists and socialists who work on games and playing, it’s an old story.

I mean, you’ve been having games all over society for a long, long, long, and it’s intrinsic to the sense of society. It’s present in many places. When people go to Las Vegas, well, there are some rationale in term of what is a game. When you play poker, you do that for some reason. It’s true everywhere. We were discussing yesterday, with the Chinese colleagues who were here. In the Chinese society, the role of playing is important. We were also discussing very important and interesting issue, which is what is fun? One of the reasons for playing is for fun. We are dealing with serious issues, so it’s a tradeoff between being fun and being serious.

We are a tentative vision of the theory of what is fun. I can tell you, in many of the places where we work, what is fun is death. It is very funny when people die, when people get broke. Every very sad event, which comes kind of randomly and externally, provokes some laugh around the table. That’s, of course, an interesting issue. Finally, what we do know is we do work, and that’s my last slide, we do work on trying to get all of these disseminated in different places and being used in the very [inaudible] with many of my people. For instance, this one, a game is supported by facilitators, but we have made, and it took us much time, a manual. This is the manual of this game.

It’s a two-page manual. You see it’s in English right now. We do have it in local language, because of course we have an issue of language. This is for an operational game, like plain game. This is any work, so the initiation version of “What a Game”, and we do have a manual. We have a box and everything, just for dissemination. When people ask us to get it, right now, we don’t build it. We just give all the facts and all the elements. If you want to get one for serious needs, you sign a user agreement. You’re leaving, we ask you to feedback the results of your process, that’s the deal. You get everything and you can do it, and you choose the best marble in the next shop.

You can start using this process. Okay, thank you very much.

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