No abstract

Human decision-making plays a critical and challenging role in the prevention and control of public bads within socio-ecological systems. Farmers daily confront dilemmas regarding public bad management, such as infectious diseases in their crops. Their decisions interplay with multiple factors and may create the risk conditions in which a public bad can occur (e.g., a disease outbreak). This article presents an experimental board game method (DySE) and its contextualized version (Musa-game) to study the effect of individual and collective human actions on creating or preventing a public bad. The DySE method and the Musa-game add emergence and spatiality (both attributes of SES) to the study of public bads and collective action problems. This methodological proposal allows us to build a contextual understanding of how individual and collective actions of various entities lead to typical system outcomes, i.e., conditions that are (un)favourable to pathogens, and individual decisions about infectious disease management. To conceptualize our method, we used the case of Banana Xanthomonas Wilt disease in Rwanda. This research is published as a diptych. Part I (this article) covers the conceptualization and design of Musa-game. Part II presents empirical findings from testing Musa-game with farmers in Rwanda and recommendations for using the method.

This article is the second in a series of two and presented findings from field-testing an experimental boardgame (Musa-game) with banana farmers in four villages in Eastern Rwanda. The conceptualization and design of the Musa-game were described in Part I. Musa-game gives insights into how farmers’ individual and collective decision-making and actions regarding management of a public bad interplay with other factors and characteristics of the socio-ecological system (SES). A public bad is a non-rivalrous, non-excludable issue that causes loss of social-welfare of individuals and communities. The method contributes contextual understanding about the emergence of phenomena that arise from the interactions between human and non-human actors. Musa-game was framed to study one public bad challenge in particular: the infectious crop disease Banana Xanthomonas Wilt disease (BXW). Findings increased the knowhow about the emergence and governance of conditions that hinder or enhance the spread of infectious diseases like BXW. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data suggested that individual farmers’ actions were influenced by perceptions of risk, affecting both individual and collective disease management. Additionally, the used experimental treatments allowed us to evaluate the influence of communication on risk-governance strategies. It appears that a combination of possession of technical knowledge about the disease, opportunities to communicate about the disease, and a collective disease management strategy enables the best individual actions and collective performance.