Land use decisions: By whom and to whose benefit? A serious game to uncover dynamics in farm land allocation at household level in Northern Ghana
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Globally, 38% of the land area is agricultural land (FAO, 2003), of which 45% are located on drylands, mainly in Africa and Asia, providing about 60% of the world’s food production (UNDCC, 2017). Climate change (IPCC, 2019), population growth and the increasing land pressure call for more productive yet more sustainable farm systems (Bren d’Amour et al., 2017; Rasmussen et al., 2018; Tilman et al., 2011). Worldwide, 83% of all farms are smallholder farm systems (Herrero et al., 2017), whose livelihoods strongly depend on effective land management and allocation (Bren d’Amour et al., 2017; Rasul and Thapa, 2004; Tittonell et al., 2015). But how do land-use decisions in smallholder farm households come about? And whose interests within the household do they actually represent?
In smallholder farm households, functioning much like multi-stakeholder institutions (Haddad et al., 1997; Kabeer, 1994), land allocation decisions often depend on the approval, the ambition and the abilities of influential household members, likely affecting all other household members, too (Agarwal, 1997; Doss, 2001; Michalscheck et al., 2018a). While intra-household decision-making processes have been described to depend on the interplay of prevailing interests and power positions (Haddad et al., 1997; Kusago and Barham, 2001; Michalscheck et al., 2018a; Padmanabhan, 2011; Purnomo et al., 2005; Schwilch et al., 2012), so far knowledge on interests and power positions is based on individual or joint reports by husband and wife (Becker et al., 2006; Browning et al., 2013; Doss, 2013; Elias, 2015a; Mwungu et al., 2017; Ngigi et al., 2017; Prabhu, 2010; Thomas, 1990) rather than observations on the actual interplay.
The actual interplay of interests and power positions on complex decisions in multi-stakeholder settings may be observed by means of serious gaming: in the natural resource management (NRM) context, serious games have mostly been used as an educational tool (Ansoms et al., 2015; Crovato et al., 2016; Gugerell and Zuidema, 2017; Hartig et al., 2010; Heinonen et al., 2017; Mayer et al., 2004; Merlet et al., 2018; Morganti et al., 2017; Onencan et al., 2016; Orland et al., 2014; Ouariachi et al., 2017; Salvini et al., 2016; Schulze et al., 2015; Tanwattana and Toyoda, 2018; Wang and Davies, 2015) or to facilitate consensus among stakeholders with conflicting or ill-defined interests (Craven et al., 2017; Hertzog et al., 2014; Magombeyi et al., 2008; Meinzen-Dick et al., 2018; Pacilly et al., 2019; Speelman et al., 2014). In agricultural systems research, serious games have been employed for education and co-design (Ditzler et al., 2018), but, to our knowledge, only two studies explored intra-household decision-making (Ashraf, 2009; Iversen et al., 2006) using experimental economic games to test investment decisions of spouses in Uganda and the Philippines, respectively.
With the aim to explore the process of land allocation in a socially complex smallholder farm system (Doss, 2001), we invited members of a smallholder community in Northern Ghana to join a serious game, simulating a negotiation process between a male household head, a wife and the eldest son of a hypothetical local farm household. To better understand decision-making dynamics and to compare individual visions for land allocation with the household-level decision-outcome, we addressed the following five research questions (RQs):
RQ1: How do (a) interests and (b) power positions differ among household members?
RQ2: How do individual interests and power positions shape household-level land allocation decisions?
RQ3: Can we observe trades (since person A gets a land area for crop X, person B gets a land area for crop Y) or power modes i.e. power being deployed, withheld or overruled?
RQ4: How does the simulated process compare with real-life negotiations on land allocation?
RQ5: How do the individual preferences on land allocation and the household-level decision-outcome compare in terms of the nutritional yield (food production), their economic (profitability), environmental (soil organic matter) and social (labour input) performance?
After introducing the case-study community and game methodology, we present and discuss the game process and results as well as the implications of our findings for ongoing research projects and land use policies that aim to bring about positive change in smallholder farmers lives.
Section snippets
Case-study site description
Most smallholder farm systems in Ghana are located on communally owned land, governed by customary laws (Aryeetey et al., 2007; Lambrecht and Asare, 2016). Customary laws in Ghana determine that land decisions are typically ‘taken by chiefs or male household-heads on behalf of the community, clan or family ‘(Apusigah, 2009; FAO, 2019, 2006). In Northern Ghana, the Dagombas are the dominant ethnic group, who perceive land as being spiritually connected to their ancestors (Apusigah, 2009) and who
Participant demographics
The game was played with six HHHs, five wives and five eldest sons. Fig. 2 illustrates the participants’ age structure and household resource endowments. Seven of the sixteen participants were associated with MRE households, being the game’s target farm type. The HHH opened the game by introducing himself as the landlord, alluding to his customary bundle of land rights.
Individual interests (RQ1a)
Individual interests are embedded in overall production objectives, translating into crop choices and associated crop areas.
Discussion
The serious game provided novel insights into land allocation processes within smallholder farm households in Northern Ghana: wives and sons envisioned a more diverse cropping pattern than the HHHs, significantly influencing the household-level decision-outcome despite their power shares being evaluated as relatively small (12–14%). The wives’ suggestion was substantially more ambitious in terms of ‘own profits’ and female labour contributions than the vision of the HHHs and the sons, possibly
Conclusion
Our serious game provided valuable new insights into negotiation processes around land allocation: the encountered integrative negotiation style led to the coalescence of the different intra-household perspectives into a household-level compromise rather than a unilateral decision-outcome. We observed a funnel-like process, where the HHH was the key decision maker acting as a strategic gatekeeper at the funnel stem but with the wife and the son having a significant influence on ‘his decision’.
Acknowledgements
The research was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)(AID-BFS-G-11-00002) as part of the US Government's ‘Feed the Future’ Initiative. The contents are the responsibility of the producing organizations and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of USAID or the U.S. Government. We thank Baba Iddrissu Mohammed, Alhassan Sulemana and Ruhia Iddrisu Adam for facilitating the game, Rashida Abdulai for co-analyzing the video-material and Carl Timler for supporting
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