WAT-A-GAME: Sharing water and policies in your own basin

After having designed and used various games for learning and supporting water management and governance, many similarities appear. However, the components, topologies, and social and political setting of the basins are different. Therefore we have started designing and\nvalidating a new generic game platform, WAT-A-GAME, alias AMANZI. This new game aims at facilitating exploration and transformation of water management and water use at the small catchment scale. It gives a simple but enlightening view of the various consequences of individual and collective choices, including regulation policies. After comparing it with some previous games, we discuss its main rationales and features. We show how it can be adapted to very different settings, how players can usefully contribute to designing an instance, and how it can especially address dialogue between multi-level stakeholders. We describe an application in South-Africa, in the Inkomati basin and the preliminary results of this instance.