Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/281439 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Citation: 
[Journal:] Land Use Policy [ISSN:] 1873-5754 [Volume:] 139 [Article No.:] 107067 [Publisher:] Elsevier [Place:] Amsterdam [u.a.] [Year:] 2024
Publisher: 
Elsevier, Amsterdam [u.a.]
Abstract: 
This study investigates how Maya farmers in Mexico respond to agri-environmental subsidies aimed at promoting sustainable land use decisions. We do so through a serious games approach, using a tailor-designed board game to identify the land use behaviors of Maya farmers. The game simulated three different subsidy programs promoting mechanized agriculture, forest conservation, and agroforestry. We find that farmers tend to clear forested areas in response to agroforestry subsidies. Also, we observe that land use decisions are path-dependent, with farmers adhering to traditional and mechanized agriculture and hesitant to engage in conservation and agroforestry. These findings highlight the potential of serious games as a tool to improve understandings of how farmers make land use decisions and the resulting land use change patterns. Specifically, our findings show that serious games are well suited to understand how path dependency in decision-making can influence the effect of subsidies – and whether subsidies thereby achieve the intended goals, such as reduced deforestation.
Subjects: 
land use complexity
land use decisions
Maya farmers
political drivers
serious games
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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