Paper short abstract:

Integrating nature and agriculture is difficult because of stakeholder differences. To research and support an inclusive nature-agriculture transition aimed at sustainable land use, we are developing a serious game for stakeholders to explore and share new perspectives.

Paper long abstract:

To improve sustainable land use in the Netherlands, multiple stakeholders (e.g. farmers, municipalities, nature conservation organizations) need to cooperate. Due to diverging interests and ideas of these stakeholders, nature-agriculture transition is difficult. We want to explore to what extent a serious game can contribute to navigating these stakeholder differences and what criteria and settings are needed for this. We are developing a serious game in which we use different options for sustainable land use and integrate different stakeholder roles. We hypothesize that the balance between fictional and real game elements invites stakeholders to explore other perspectives, while ensuring applicability of the game in reality. With our game we aim to contribute to the development of a shared responsibility for sustainable land use. In our contribution we would like to explain the development of the game and reflect on the question to what extent researchers and stakeholders can and should contribute to the process of making a transformation (possible) and doing the actual transformation, and what the potential role of serious games is herein. We anticipate that a workshop format, in which the conference attendants can explore the game themselves, would be most suitable for our contribution, but we could also explain our game in an interactive presentation format.