ALBERT

Description: Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), Disaster Risk Management (DRM), and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) involve a variety of stakeholders with different backgrounds, organizational frameworks, divergent concerns, and sometimes competing agendas. This requires forums where such groups can meet in order to enhance understanding, reconcile different views, and potentially assist each other in meeting their respective goals. One means of establishing such an exchange involves serious games. During the ESPREssO (Enhancing Synergies for disaster Prevention in the European Union) project, three such games, referred to as RAMSETE (Risk Assessment Model Simulation for Emergency Training Exercise), were developed. They were based on table-top, role-playing, scenario-based exercises, and their purpose was for stakeholder information elicitation about policy issues related to DRR, DRM, and CCA. Participants in the exercises were assigned roles where they interacted and negotiated in order to deal with the presented scenarios. The scenarios were primarily concerned with selecting an optimal set of policies to deal best with the issue in question. The games, while sometimes including an operational element, were meant to examine the motivations behind the decisions made, rather than to test or to train in response protocols. The participants in general found the games to be useful for framing discussions about complex issues, while their problem-solving character was appreciated and enjoyed. Such games allow stakeholders to openly discuss and challenge ideas, policies, and processes in a manner they would not normally do in their daily activities, with other professionals who they would not necessarily be in frequent contact with.

Description: The ESPREssO Project set out to propose ways to inform more coherent national and European approaches on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA). A critical step in this process is the identification of existing barriers to effective collaboration, finding new areas of common ground, and ways to enhance co-operation with regards to CCA and DRR policymaking in Europe. This is particularly important considering the potential relationships between CCA and DRR activities at the regional, national, European and global levels. Serious games have emerged as a valuable tool to communicate information and catalyse discussion in many policy arenas. The games have the power to inform, mainly by exposing strengths and weaknesses of a system but not necessarily create policy choices. This paper presents the development process and rationale behind creation of RAMSETE I, a serious game developed by and for the ESPREssO Project to elicit information from its stakeholders in aiming to inform synergies between CCA and DRR sectors. The results assess its application as a device to frame discussions during an international Think Tank workshop. The serious game focused on three particular aspects of CCA and DRR policy interactions: (1) separation of administrative responsibilities and the use of different terminology, (2) the ongoing competition for funding and political will as well as (3) difficulties regarding the top-down implementation of policies. The rules and design process are presented briefly, before going in-depth into the information gleaned during its application in the workshop.