Planspiel-Literaturdatenbank des ZMS

Abstract: These environmental and social challenges of the Anthropocene require us to imagine and implement alternatives to the current global economic organization. Accounting in biophysical flows (material, energy, land use, …) is one grid of analysis providing insights on the alternatives’ sustainability (strong sustainability and ecological economics frameworks). These tools are indeed relevant to highlight systemic effects (interdisciplinary understandings, spatial and temporal scales) on resources and important pressures to consider for the transformation of territories. If this biophysical flow vision may be very useful, it however remains for expert use only. However, one of the challenges of transition territories is to involve the populations in participatory processes in order to put their knowledge, wishes and specific capacities for action in synergy. Among the several participatory tools, serious games have long since proven their ability to sensitize to sustainability issues, facilitate learning and support changes. This paper presents an exploratory work to get insights on how playing with material and energy flows, fostering biophysical accounting and systemic vision learning to support stakeholders in territories’ transitions. A first work on literature aims at understanding how resource flows are involved in existing sustainability games. We then present three experiments we made to play with material and energy flows analysis: one first game focusing on biophysical accounting, two games aimed at pointing out systemic effects on resources and three workshops in which an energy flow analysis diagram was discussed with stakeholders in a territory involved in resource management participatory process.