S I M U L A T I O N   G A M E S

  Six environmental campaigners are poised for Professor Dmitri Kavtaradze's stopwatch to begin. The participants of this environ-mental simulation game are standing around a makeshift circle concocted from a piece of string. Inside the circle are coloured card discs with a number on each one. At the word "go," no one speaks but the man on the furthest left points his toe to numbers one and two and then steps out of the circle. His neighbour quickly indicates three and steps back and next to him a woman finds four, five and six. After her, a man hesitates to find seven but an urgent look from his neighbour solves the problem. The game continues, back and forth across the human chain. Occasionally a sound issues from someone's lips to accompany a desperate gesticulation, but otherwise silence until all the numbers in the circle have been discovered.

  Kavtaradze is pleased. The group has taken 52 seconds to find all the discs in numerical order, an improvement from the previous attempt. "When you started you were equal, then you came to the idea that you have different roles - some started to point and scream, others ran," he tells his students. "In 15 minutes you changed the structure of your group, trying to fit it to your activity." He asks the participants what they think the game is trying to teach them. "It makes very clear the importance of teamwork to CSOs," notes one civil society organisation (CSO) representative, Marie Kranendonk-Schwartz. Campaigner Jim Manlowe of a US-based organisation adds that it was interesting to see that the group achieved better results with a delegated leader, compared to working together on the same level. In a wider context, such a game can help CSOs to realise the strengths and weaknesses of individuals in their organisation, explains the professor. "We are not so weak, we are not so poor but we are very badly organised inside the CSO movement." To implement the concepts agreed at Aarhus this year, he continues, CSOs will need to be well prepared. A bit of interactive fun can make all the difference.

  Kavtaradze of Moscow State University's laboratory of ecology and nature conservation is lucky enough to make his living from playing games. His playmates have included Russian ministers of education as well as CSOs and school children. Using interactive teaching methods developed in the USSR by Maria Birshtein in the late 1930s and fine-tuned by both Western and Russian writers, he decided to apply the principles to environmental training. Such teaching works on the basic idea that participants must learn to communicate productively with each other - to hear and listen, speak and be understood. A group should be able to work together as a team to make effective decisions. More than 20 simulation games and toys were designed and published by Moscow State University in the 1980s and 1990s. Kavtaradze and his colleagues have designed special simulation games to help inspectors fight against poachers and have worked extensively with environmental CSOs. "I think that the CSOs of my generation were mostly fighters - against poachers, against building a factory on Lake Baikal - now they must progress from being fighters to being expert organisers of every day life," he tells Insight. In post-communist society environmental organisations are more fragmented and must learn to work effectively together and promote themselves better, he adds.

  Moreover, CSOs could achieve better results for the environment if they worked with other experts such as scientists, engineers and transport specialists. Kavtaradze recommends the simulation game "Development without Destruction," which was prepared by Moscow State University to encourage a decisionmaking process for regional sustainable development. Participants from different expert fields and CSO backgrounds can play the game, which involves building a fictional community, complete with amenities such as power stations or an airport, on an untouched area of land. Another training, primarily directed at schools, is a card game called "The Island," which simulates dynamic development of ecosystems. Students learn that some animals, such as the weasel, are more crucial to nature than others. If man or natural disasters wipe out a large amount of the lower value cards of grass and mice, the weasel is unable to survive. Making the step from playing classroom games is the most difficult. "We are playing very nice games and living a very ugly life," points out campaigner Marie Haisova of Agentura GAIA in the Czech Republic. Kavtaradze hopes to prepare his students adequately to make that leap into reality. He concludes: "The future of CSOs is to be more adventurous and better educated than the ministers."