Paper long abstract:

Nowadays, infectious diseases, in humans, animals, or plants, are among the most challenging public bad problems. Favourable conditions for pathogens to manifest in hosts may be created by humans, causing risk conditions. Our research aims to contribute, both theoretically and methodologically, to the study of the human behavioural aspect of the complex interactions that lead those risk conditions. We present a method to study how farmers' decision-making interplays with other (socio-ecological) factors, and creates the conditions that hinder or enhance the spread of an infectious disease.

We focus on decision making about infectious crop disease management. Adequate management of crop diseases requires efficient communication of knowledge and information, effective monitoring and governance, and collective action. However, traditional diffusion of knowledge based, approaches have shown ineffective for addressing crop diseases in smallholder farming. Reasons are that they are linear and top-down, have limited or no space for farmer generated feedback, and are poorly contextualized. Simultaneously, understanding of what farmers do to prevent or control diseases, why, and how, is poor.

We developed an experimental board game to study farmers' decision-making under different risk governance models, combining features from economic experiments, agent-based models, and role games. We build on the well-known common good design, in which subjects need to choose to contribute or not contribute to the protection of a common good (crop production) and prevention of a public bad (crop disease). The method contributes to the development of knowledge about effective management of infectious crop diseases. Researchers and policy makers can learn from assessing behaviour of subjects, which may contribute to answering questions about effective ways of disease communication and monitoring. Farmers the game offers a chance to learn and exchange about the dynamics of infectious crop diseases, the importance of collective action, and experiences with different management strategies.

To conceptualize our method we used the case of Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW) disease in Rwanda. BXW is a disease that is common throughout East and Central Africa, affecting a crop that is a critical provider of food and income security to smallholder farmers. This abstract is based on two pieces or research outputs: Firstly, a methodological paper about the game's theoretical and conceptual framing; and secondly preliminary findings from implementing the game with banana farmers in Rwanda.