Serious Games for One Health Governance: Exploring Skills, Evidence, and Collaboration in Antimicrobial Resistance Policy Deliberations

Abstract

This dissertation examines collaborative governance to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a wicked One Health problem that spans the human, animal, and environmental sectors. Using a role-play simulation exercise, it explores how technical evidence, stakeholder values and interests, and power shape collaborative governance, as well as what skills are used in these types of deliberations. Chapter 2 investigates how STEM-H students and early-career researchers employed 21st - century skills in the role-play simulation exercise. It tackles the question: How do engineering students demonstrate and reflect on 21st-century skills during a serious-game-based policy deliberation on antimicrobial resistance? Skills such as communication, collaboration, problem solving, and evidence integration are commonly seen as necessary for these types of deliberations; this research shows that these interrelated skills can be practiced through serious games, which can help prepare technical professionals to work across sectors and engage at the science-policy interface. Chapter 3 examines the politics of evidence when scientific information is being used in multistakeholder deliberations. Specifically, this chapter answers two questions. First, how did novice participants' understanding of the politics of evidence change as a result of participating in a role-play simulation exercise? Second, what dynamics around the use of evidence emerged during the simulation? Participants used, contested, and interpreted scientific information in ways shaped by stakeholder interests, values, and power. Coalition-building, selective evidence use, and narrative framing demonstrated that evidence-informed policy requires attention to political and relational dynamics as well as technical rigor. Participants also left with a unique tension; they found that stakeholders' values, interests, and priorities were more influential than they had initially anticipated, yet believed those factors should play a more limited role relative to scientific evidence. Chapter 4 focuses on the challenges and opportunities associated with collaborative governance that emerged as AMR practitioners and content experts participated in the role-play simulation exercise. This chapter answers: What opportunities and constraints for collaborative governance emerge when stakeholders deliberate in a multistakeholder antimicrobial resistance policy simulation? Although cross-sector representation allowed for more holistic and creative policy development and discussion of burden sharing, it did not automatically produce trust, consensus, or implementable action. Time constraints, resource concerns, competing values, and the absence of actors with decision-making authority limited what could be done during the deliberations and provided opportunities for improvement. Together, this dissertation shows many different aspects of AMR governance and multi-stakeholder deliberations. Furthermore, it demonstrates that serious games can serve as both pedagogical and research tools, providing opportunities for participants to practice and reflect on many aspects of multi-stakeholder deliberation while making its underlying dynamics more visible to researchers.