Using self-designed role-playing games and a multi-agent system to empower a local decision-making process for land use management: the self-Cormas experiment in Senegal

As agricultural and environmental issues are more and more inter-linked, the increasing multiplicity of stakeholders, with differing and often conflicting land use representations and strategies, underlines the need for innovative methods and tools to support their coordination, mediation and negotiation processes aiming at an improved, more decentralized and integrated natural resources management. But how can technology fit best with such a novel means of support? Even the present participatory modeling method is not really designed to avoid this technocratic drift and encourage the empowerment of stakeholders in the land use planning process. In fact, to truly integrate people and principals in the decision-making process of land use management and planning, information technology should not only support a mere access to information but also help people to participate fully in its design, process and usage. That means allow people to use the modeling support not to provide solutions, but to help people to steer their course within an incremental, iterative, and shared decision-making process. To this end, since 1997 we have experimented at an operational level (2500 km2) in the Senegal River valley a Self-Design Method that places modeling tools at stakeholders' and principals' disposal, right from the initial stages. The experiment presented here links Multi-Agent Systems and Role-Playing Games within a self-design and use process. The main objective was to test direct modeling design of these tools by stakeholders, with as little prior design work by the modeler as possible. This "self-design" experiment was organized in the form of participatory workshops which has led on discussions, appraisals, and decisions about planning land use management, already applied two years after the first workshops. (Résumé d'auteur)