Abstract
Globally, 38% of the land area is agricultural land, of which 45% are located on drylands, mainly in Africa andAsia, constituting the basis for about 60% of the world’s food production. Of all farms worldwide, 83% aresmallholder farm systems, whose livelihoods depend on effective land management and allocation. While land isoften cultivated by the various members of a farm household, land allocation decisions depend on the approval,the ambition and the abilities of influential household members, likely affecting all other household members,too. While intra-household decision-making processes have been described to depend on the interplay of pre-vailing interests and power positions, so far knowledge on interests and power positions is based on individualreports rather than actual observations. With the aim to explore the process of land allocation in a sociallycomplex smallholder farm system, we invited members of a smallholder community in Northern Ghana to join aclosed, experimental serious game, simulating a negotiation process between a male household head (HHH), awife and the eldest son of a hypothetical local farm household. We observed an integrative negotiation style,resulting into high levels of satisfaction with the negotiation process and outcome by all parties, who reported ahigh level of similarity between simulated and real-life negotiations. Power was observed to be actively de-ployed, withheld or passively overruled depending on decision domains and process dynamics. While the HHHwas the key decision maker acting as a strategic gatekeeper in a funnel-like process, the wife and the son had asignificant influence on ‘his decision’ i.e. the household-level negotiation outcome. Model-based analysis alsoshowed that the household-level outcome was more profitable as well as agro-biologically and nutritionallymore diverse and productive as compared to the HHHs’ suggestion. The proposed game proved to be a culturallyadequate, simple, cost and time effective tool to capture how household-level land use decisions may come aboutand whose interests they represent. Our study provides a powerful framework for further research and forpolicies to foster more equitable land use decisions and therewith more sustainable socio-ecological systems.