Copyright © 2020 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance. García-Barrios, L., T. Rivera-Núñez, J. Cruz-Morales, J. Urllapideta-Carrasco, E. Castro-Salcido, I. Peña-Azcona, O. Martínez- López, A. López-Cruz, M. Morales, and J. Espinoza. 2020. The Flow of Peasant Lives: a board game to simulate livelihood strategies and trajectories resulting from complex rural household decisions. Ecology and Society 25(4):48. https://doi.org/10.5751/ ES-11723-250448 Research The Flow of Peasant Lives: a board game to simulate livelihood strategies and trajectories resulting from complex rural household decisions Luis García-Barrios 1 , Tlacaelel Rivera-Núñez 2 , Juana Cruz-Morales 3 , Jorge Urdapilleta-Carrasco 1 , Elizabeth Castro-Salcido 1 , Ivett Peña-Azcona 2 , Oscar Martínez-López 2 , Angelita López-Cruz 4 , Merci Morales 5 and Jorge Espinoza 5 ABSTRACT. Since the 1990s, many of neoliberalism’s policies for growth and development have contributed to the deterioration of living conditions for rural peasants who are marginalized and unwilling or unable to abandon their lands. In every nation in which this phenomenon is prevalent, the resulting impoverishment of rural peasants has motivated numerous academic studies and poverty- alleviation programs. Concurrently, peasants have been developing and modifying their strategies for social reproduction, under conditions that are usually uncertain and restrictive. Here, we describe the design and implementation of a serious board game called The Flow of Peasant Lives (TFPL). TFPL is a complex but player-friendly game that was developed and parameterized using information and first-hand knowledge that the authors gained through 15 years of interaction and discussion with peasant residents of La Sepultura Man in the Biosphere-United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico. The game was implemented in November 2017 in workshops held in six rural communities in the Sierra Madre of Chiapas, Mexico. During the workshops, 126 participants made 21,600 recorded decisions about capacity allocations during 393 simulated years of rural life. Strategies followed by members of rural households (as a team) led the game along ascendant, descendant, and oscillatory trajectories in the reproduction of capabilities, as is actually the case in rural life contexts. The great majority of academic approaches seeks to influence the transformation of rural life starting from preconceived notions about peasants’ needs. In contrast, TFPL is a social- immanent learning tool that provides a safe, fun venue where rural households can make their realities explicit, exchange ideas, explore possibilities for action, and discuss what needs to be changed. It has great potential for transfer to other rural contexts because it balances research components that are nomothetic (general) with ones that are ideographic (particular). Key Words: immanent social learning; livelihoods; rural households; serious board game; social reproduction; transferability INTRODUCTION Although urban areas have grown rapidly during recent decades, approximately 46% of the global population, including 80% of the world’s poor, live in rural areas (World Bank 2020). The complex reality of the majority of poor rural populations is characterized by social exclusion, inequitable economic exchanges, malnutrition, deficient public services such as education and healthcare, and lack of employment opportunities (de la O Campos et al. 2018). Academic interest has grown in identifying and understanding strategies that rural households (RHs) develop to subsist in such environments, and conditions that RHs must overcome and change to improve their lives. To understand how RHs confront their difficult life conditions and how they may improve them, there is a need to understand their social reproduction on an intracommunitarian level as well as on a social-class level using historical analytical approaches. Social reproduction research analyzes the subsistence conditions of social classes based on their economic activities, subjectivities, and internal social relations, as well as the multiple relationships they establish with the broader economic system and political- ideological regimes (Bourdieu 1973, Long 1984, Godelier 1991, Narotzky 2004). In the 20th century, Mexico’s peasant class (or “preclass”) has transitioned through many phases. As a result of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), they were able to obtain land and thereby escape exploitation on haciendas based on indentured servitude. From the early 1950s to approximately 1970, they played a central role in federally subsidized food production during a period of national food self-sufficiency (the so-called “Mexican miracle”). In the 1980s, they were negatively affected by withdrawal of subsidies, for example, during the “Uruguay Round” of multilateral trade negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (precursor to neoliberalism). As a result of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), they underwent further socioeconomic and political reorganization (Cornelius and Myhre 1998, Barkin 2002). Before such neoliberal policies, social reproduction of Mexico’s peasant class occurred as a result of socioeconomic pluriactivity within their territories, involving subsistence agriculture, government subsidies to produce food for the national market, agricultural wage labor, and regional migration. However, this situation gave way to interaction with multiple actors and development agendas such as agroexportation markets and environmental conservation policies (e.g., payment for environmental services, ecotourism, agroforestry projects), receiving welfare monetary handouts, and migrating as cheap labor in international labor markets. Implementation of neoliberalism worldwide (Fletcher 2019) led rural studies researchers to seek to understand the political, economic, and sociocultural impacts on the social reproduction of rural peasant societies (Ellis 1998, Kay 2008). While formerly classical structuralist approaches (political economy and theory 1 Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, Dirección Regional Sureste, México, 2 Departamento de Agricultura, Sociedad y Ambiente, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Unidad San Cristóbal, 3 Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Campus Chiapas, México, 4 Investigadora independiente, 5 Facultad de Ingeniería Agroindustrial, Universidad Politécnica de Tapachula