Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals aim at ending food insecurity by 2030. Therefore, civil society needs to understand the inherent complexities of both socio-economic and ecological dynamics and their interdependencies. In particular, the behavioural dynamics that underpin human agents are crucial in driving the final outcomes in terms of community food security and require further attention. Using household behaviour within a rural village of Southern Malawi as an example, we describe a game theory model representing cropping strategies: (1) cooperation, as driven by other-regarding preferences, and (2) conformation, the tendency to converge to similar crop planting choices as opposed to differentiation (and thus crop diversity). We find that the latter plays a crucial role in driving the system towards successful strategies: how individuals relate to social norms has greater effect. Cooperation is only necessary for community success when the community converges on crop planting choices. On the contrary, differentiation, the affirmation of the individual unique identity, can succeed with or without cooperation. We further elaborate on the idea that community level sustainability can be reached through different pathways, which might require food exchange mechanisms within and beyond the system boundaries.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the advice and support of Marije Schaafsma (University of Southampton), who provided the dataset analysed; Kate Schreckenberg (King’s College London), who led the work on the participatory rural appraisals within the ASSETS project; Samantha Dobbie for the extensive work on sustainable livelihoods achieved during her doctoral research at the University of Southampton; and Ortzi Akizu-Gardoki (University of the Basque Country) for the design of Fig. 1.
Funding
This research is supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program and by the Ikertzaile Doktoreentzako Hobekuntzarako doktoretza-ondoko Programa and by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness MINECO through BC3 María de Maeztu excellence accreditation MDM-2017-0714 and by the Leverhulme TrustResearch Fellowship “CREATE: the network components of creativity and success. This work was also inspired and partially funded by the ASSETS (Attaining Sustainable Services from Ecosystems) project (NERC/ESPA NE-J002267-1).
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Balbi, S., Alvarez-Rodriguez, U., Latora, V. et al. A game theory model to explore the role of cooperation and diversity in community food security: the case of Southern Malawi. Reg Environ Change 20, 63 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-020-01642-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-020-01642-5