Description

In the early 1990s, everyone agreed on the relative failure of irrigated systems in the mid Senegal River valley: a reclamation rate and yields far less than forecast. Attempts to explain this through disciplinary viewpoints were doomed to failure. CIRAD took up this question by raising the hypothesis of the influence of coordination patterns within irrigated systems. Through two PhD theses we have been involved firstly from a research perspective to explore various scenarios for coordination patterns between farmers. This involvement produced an agent based model and a role-playing game, and contributed to the conception of the companion modelling stance. We then sought to understand what happened in the role-playing games to test their relevance as a discussion medium and a way of investigating the social reality.

The approach was broken down into three phases:

1.  Developing three successive versions of agent based models representing an archetypal irrigated system in Senegal: one based on water flows within the irrigated scheme, a second considering the questions of loans and exchange of services between irrigating farmers and a third taking rules for changing rules into account;
2.  Translating the third agent based model in a role-playing game to restore phase 1 to the farmers interviewed;
3. Exploring the game thus constructed and its ability to fuel discussion on actual farmer issues.

The approach set the first milestones of the companion modelling approach and accounted for the use by the farmers of game settings to explore collective sensitive questions, even taboos in their own irrigated systems.