Using surface water games to engage communities in water management in Odisha, India

By Mequanint B. Melesse, Vishwambhar Duche, Anupama Guvvalavenkata, Dron Kumar, Richu Sanil, Thomas Falk, and Ruth Meinzen-Dick

In many semi-arid and arid dryland regions of India, water scarcity is a serious challenge to development. In these regions, prolonged droughts and climate variability pose a threat to both agricultural systems and livelihoods. As a result, the majority of these regions are characterized as having high to extreme water stress.

Participatory development is a promising approach for tackling these problems. Through this approach, rather than being passively affected by external interventions, local communities actively participate in the design of locally-adapted rules to motivate and sustain changes in water users’ behaviors. However, a key challenge for practitioners is to find tools that can help facilitate a judicious coordination among many water users for effective management of water resources.

Introducing the surface water games

Under the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) introduce collective action games such as the surface water game (SWG) to enable communities to better manage their water resources.

The SWG is an innovative, participatory tool designed to enhance the capacity of development practitioners from government, non-government organizations (NGOs), and elsewhere to assist communities to better manage their surface water resources. The game simulates real-world challenges faced by local communities – encouraging dialogue, highlighting the interconnectedness of water users, deepening participants’ understanding of water dynamics, and fostering social learning and collaboration. It provides a structured and interactive platform, enabling participants to explore strategies for equitable allocation of surface water resources and management of conflicts – through participatory and inclusive governance.

In 2022, ICRISAT and FES collaboratively trained development practitioners from government and NGOs, and other facilitators in Odisha, on using experiential learning games. The aim was to develop capacity for integrating the SWG into community-based water management toolkits. The training programs included conceptual background on water as a common resource; game facilitation focusing on communicating processes, building trust, and fostering connections; and demonstration sessions in the field, followed by debriefings focusing on collaboratively interpreting game results and relating them to real-life community challenges.

Community outreach and feedback

In November 2024, more than 110 practitioners from government, NGOs, and the private sector shared their experiences on integrating the SWG into their water management toolkits. Overall, they reported rolling out the SWG to reach 108 village communities in their working sites.

A majority of the practitioners felt that the SWG was easy to understand and implement and appreciated its support in helping them to improve community engagement (see Figure 1). The practitioners highlighted several aspects that community participants enjoyed most about the game, including their interdependence in managing and using water resources, and the debriefing sessions that helped them transfer lessons learned from game playing to real-life challenges in water management.

One practitioner expressed that: “Game-playing community members realized that water availability is dependent on their contributions to maintain water infrastructures well, and that their crop choices would have real consequences for water availability for livestock and domestic purposes. Following this recognition, there is now growing interest during community discussions in topics like water management, crop choice, inclusive conflict resolution, and collective unity.”

Around 47 percent of the practitioners indicated that women always participated in game sessions and related discussions, while 51 percent reported that women participated most of the time. But, despite good levels of participation at game sessions, practitioners reported challenges to women’s wider involvement – relating to cultural norms and time limitations caused by pressure to attend home chores. This highlights the need for adapted actions that ensure gender equality in both using the SWG and in wider inclusive water governance.

Practitioners’ perspective

Practitioners appeared to agree on the potential of the SWG to help implementing agents – such as government, NGOs, or private organizations – in carrying out their projects and building local capacity to manage water resources and sustain infrastructure. They highlighted several benefits of integrating the SWG into their water management and governance toolkits, but the main message was that the game provided a mechanism for raising community awareness on water as a valuable common resource.

Such understanding helped communities to cooperatively craft rules and regulations for better and sustainable management of water resources. Playing the game helped community members to link their decisions on how to maintain water infrastructures, and which crops to choose, with water availability and variability in real time. This provided data points for understanding how individual decisions affect community well-being as a whole.

Overall, 94 percent of practitioners appreciated the value of the game and would recommend it to other implementing agents involved in water management. The remaining 6 percent hesitated to automatically recommend the game for others, citing logistical demands and the facilitation efforts of running the games.

Finally, practitioners called for continued support and collaboration, especially in capacity building. Some organizations, such as the Odisha Livelihoods Mission, have already started training their frontline workers to effectively integrate water games into water management tools. But these organizations called for more support for capacity building through training of facilitators on a larger scale. Some also requested support for game toolkits to enable them to bring experiential games to more communities.

Mequanint B. Melesse is a Senior Scientist and Cluster Head of Technology Adoption and Impact Analysis in the Enabling Systems Transformation research program at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). Vishwambhar Duche and Anupama Guvvalavenkata are Senior Scientific Officers at ICRISAT. Dron Kumar and Richu Sanil serve as Senior Project Managers at the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES). Thomas Falk is a Research Fellow at the Natural Resources and Resilience (NRR) Unit, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Ruth Meinzen-Dick is a Senior Research Fellow, NRR Unit, IFPRI.

This work was carried out under the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains, which is grateful for the support of CGIAR Trust Fund contributors: www.cgiar.org/funders

Header image: Facilitating surface water games at Angul, Odisha, India. Photo by Vishwambhar Duche.