Overcoming Barriers to Local Participation: Serious Board Game Experience

Abstract

In Türkiye, debates on local participation are often shaped around municipal strategic plans, policy documents, and institutional participation mechanisms. However, the extent to which these debates transform citizen-politician relations, trust dynamics, and experiential participation practices in the field has received limited scholarly attention. The actual functioning of local participation depends not only on the existence of procedures but also on citizens’ motivation to participate, trust in decision-makers, access to information, and the deliberative capacity among actors. Psychological and political vulnerabilities such as a sense of ineffectiveness, the perception that change is not possible, distance from politics, and fears of being misunderstood or judged weaken local participation processes when combined with deficiencies in institutional capacity and information asymmetries. This study aims to make these barriers visible and discusses serious board games as an innovative tool that can structure processes of mutual learning, trust-building, empathy, and consensus-building in local participation. Today, serious board games are increasingly usedas complementary participation tools that create a space for experiential dialogue and make the priorities of actors in local participation processes visible. Within this framework, drawing on the relevant literature and limited serious game experiences in Türkiye, the article examines the serious board game City Making 101, which is used to support participatory deliberation in urban planning processes, through a “green public space” scenario with a descriptive approach. The study emphasizes that serious board games should be considered both as complementary policy tools that can be used in the field and as experiential methods that can be positioned within qualitative research in overcoming psycho-social barriers to local participation. It also argues that the success of serious game experiences should be discussed not only through nomothetic indicators such as the number of participants or satisfaction levels, but also through idiographic criteria such as institutional learning, the internalization of democracy, behavioral change, and the quality of the participation experience. In this regard, the article argues that serious board games can be evaluated as experiential research tools capable of revealing the underlying causes of psycho-social barriers emerging in local participation processes and contributing to local democracy processes by opening these barriers to discussion in the field.