Effective water management requires that all stakeholders in a watershed coordinate their actions. The serious game Causerie was developed to foster dialogue among these stakeholders and co-design agro-environmental scenarios for territorial development — including strategies to reduce river pollution.

Reducing contamination of rivers by plant protection products (insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc.) remains a major challenge. Although solutions exist, they are still insufficiently implemented or optimized at the watershed scale. Actions taken on a single farm often have only a marginal impact on collective outcomes — such as water quality at the watershed outlet. Moreover, the effectiveness of a farmer’s effort depends on factors such as spatial location (distance to the outlet, soil quality, etc.) and their economic or social situation (farm type, resources, constraints...).

Collective Action: Essential for Improving Water Quality

Beyond farmers, many other actors are involved in maintaining water quality within watersheds — advisors, policymakers, actors along agricultural value chains, water managers, land planners, environmental associations, fishers, hunters, and citizens.

Each group has different perspectives and areas of intervention. Yet, collective action is far more effective in improving water quality. Various levers can be mobilized — agricultural practices, soil characteristics, topography, and also vegetation cover and landscape organization. These elements play a crucial role in the transfer of pesticides, influencing the type and quantity of substances mobilized, their dilution, retention, and degradation before they reach watercourses.

In this context, the Diffuse Pollution team from INRAE’s RiverLy unit, in partnership with the G-Eau joint research unit, developed a participatory tool to promote coordinated action at the integrative scale of small watersheds (a few km²). The goal: to reconcile agriculture and water quality by accounting for the spatial and temporal dimensions of corrective actions and their effects.

A Serious Game as a Dialogue Tool for Operational Stakeholders

The Causerie serious game explores how collective action can serve as a lever to improve water quality in agricultural watersheds. Through a realistic simulation, the game helps participants identify more effective, coordinated actions at the watershed scale.

Causerie features different crop management and landscape planning strategies, and allows players to visualize potential impacts on river contamination from plant protection products.

Structure and Dynamics of the Causerie Serious Game

The Causerie game consists of physical components (printable materials) and a geospatial interface (GeoMelba software), which enables visualization of rapid pesticide transfers across a realistic, fictitious watershed.

The game is based on two virtual watersheds:

• one in a viticultural context,
• and one in a mixed crop-livestock context.

Each watershed includes:

• the land parcels and agricultural land use of each farmer,
• three types of farming systems with decreasing levels of pesticide inputs (insurance-based, optimized, and pesticide-free),
• and the physical characteristics of the watershed — relief and landscape elements that influence runoff and drainage-based pesticide transfers (ditches, paths, drains, hedgerows, grass strips, artificial wetland buffer zones, etc.).

Players assume one of three roles, each with their own starting conditions and objectives:

• Farmers (up to 7 different profiles),
• Watershed management syndicate,
• Agro-supplier or cooperative,
• Advisory body.

The game integrates three types of dynamics:

• Landscape dynamics, simulating land-use and landscape changes at each game round (representing a three-year period),
• Agro-economic dynamics, through a simplified farm account balance,
• Social dynamics, emerging from facilitation and player interactions during gameplay.

At the end of each round, players draw event cards introducing new developments (climate, economic, social, or regulatory changes), creating constraints or opportunities for adaptation.

A final debriefing session allows participants to step beyond the game framework to discuss broader insights — identifying barriers and levers for fostering collective action.

Download the Causerie Serious Game

The Causerie serious game is freely available for download. It includes:

• Game facilitation guides and the GeoMelba software manual,
• Printable materials for the mixed crop-livestock watershed,
• Printable materials for the viticultural watershed,
• The GeoMelba software.

 To download the Causerie serious game, please complete the form here.

Watch the video (in French) to learn more about the Causerie game