Session Description
Baselines Have Memory is a 90-minute strategy game for impact assessment practitioners, regulators, community engagement specialists, researchers and funders. Participants enter a fictional river landscape facing climate stress, migration pressure, contested land use, infrastructure demand and fragile trust. Teams receive technical data, policy requirements, community narratives, historical memory cards, ecological signals, resource constraints and future shock cards. Their task is to decide what counts as evidence, which impacts become visible, whose knowledge carries authority and how monitoring adapts as the baseline keeps moving.
The session responds to IAIA27’s invitation to look back for the future of impact assessment by treating memory, local intelligence and culturally grounded knowledge as assessment infrastructure. It draws from African and Global South practice where lived experience, tacit knowledge, relational accountability and collective sense-making shape legitimate decisions. Through structured rounds, teams move from baseline setting to prediction, mitigation, monitoring and adaptive management. Each round exposes the consequences of treating local knowledge as late-stage validation, decorative consultation or living evidence.
The session closes with a practical harvest of design principles for memory-rich baselines, plural evidence standards, trust-sensitive monitoring, shared interpretation of signals and community-defined thresholds of harm and value. Participants leave with a reusable game logic for teaching, project preparation, public participation, strategic environmental assessment and institutional learning.
Session Summary
A hands-on foresight game where participants test how memory, local knowledge and changing baselines reshape impact assessment decisions. Teams navigate a fictional river landscape, weigh plural evidence, face future shocks and harvest design principles for adaptive, legitimate and community-grounded monitoring.
Additional Information
Room setup: movable tables for groups of 6–8, flip charts or wall space, markers and a projector. The game uses printed cards and facilitated table rounds. Recording permission: decline, to protect candid dialogue and unattributed peer reflection. Outputs will be captured through a collective harvest for the chair report.
Proposed By
Respecting traditional, cultural, and local knowledge in impact assessments
Session Chair
MaqC Eric Gitau
Development Dynamics
Kenya