A multiscale gaming approach to understand farmer’s decision making in the boom of maize cultivation in Laos

摘要: In Southeast Asia, the rapid expansion of boom crops like hybrid maize, rubber, oil palm, or banana, has brought about daunting environmental and socioeconomic impacts such as deforestation, land degradation, indebtedness. Why do farmers engage in keep on pursuing this farming strategy despite adverse effects local landscapes livelihoods? context northern uplands Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), we developed an innovative approach to understanding decisions that lead emergence maize boom. We successively studied adoption, expansion, intensification, diversification, abandonment intensive practices locations which these phases were ongoing at time study. To better contextualize decision making, designed applied local, serious games with seven different villages going through a Then metagame summarized our findings across all generalized form. National agricultural experts validated structure by taking role they witnessed their cumulative making within too. Core include: (1) bust can be reproduced game environment simulates change six factor combinations; (2) Farmers Laos reinvest profits into long-term, goals. The presented combines micro- macrolevel analysis land-use change. On one hand, it allows exploration social-ecological contexts decisions. other provides systematic procedure scale up, generalize, test contextual knowledge systemic complex, large-scale process.