Savanna Life – Evaluating board game players' revealed preferences to inform conservation and development planning in the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem

Martin Reinhardt Nielsen^1*Monique Borgerhoff Mulder²Gine Roll Skjærvø³Christian Andreas Klöckner⁴Espen Moe⁵Henrik Meilby¹Hans Peter Hartsteen⁶Bente Jessen Graae³

• ¹Department of Food and Resource Economics, Faculty of Natural and Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark, Denmark
• ²Department of Anthropology, College of Letters and Science, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, United States
• ³Department of Biology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway
• ⁴Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway
• ⁵Department of Sociology and Political Science, Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway
• ⁶Copenhagen Business Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark

Conservation and development planning is complex and can involve trade-offs and conflicts of interest. Games are an increasingly popular approach to exploring such conflicts and facilitating discussion and future planning. However, few studies have compared the preferences of different stakeholders in such games. The board game Savanna Life was played in 12 communities (24 games with 96 players, 2,889 observations) in 2018 and 2019 in the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem, characterised by sharp conservation-agropastoral livelihood trade-offs. The game was designed to capture the challenges experienced by communities and provide a safe space for exploring alternative livelihood and investment strategies. We explore how players of different genders, ethnicities, and nationalities maximise their payoffs within the game's logic, allocate preferences across the conservation-development nexus, and change preferences under growing constraints during the game. Using revealed preferences for game moves as an indicator, we found that, particularly men, prioritised maximising individual benefits over the game’s primary objective of winning collectively. We also found that players generally preferred moves representing agro-pastoral production over moves aligned with Western development objectives. Moves with negative conservation implications were least preferred. Players also clearly adapted their preferences to increasing constraints. Preferences varied among players based on gender, ethnicity, and nationality, with development and conservation planning implications. Post-game follow-up revealed players considered the game realistic, and that they stated planning real-life changes to how they make livelihood decisions based on insights gained while playing the game, suggesting that the game can motivate behaviour change through cognitive transfer. These results support the usefulness of games, such as Savanna Life, in providing insights for a sustainable future. However, the main benefit may be facilitating community debates after the research team departs.