The Seed Game®

The Seed Game is a participatory tool that helps communities, particularly Indigenous groups, in conservation and land-use planning. It uses seeds to visually represent priorities, facilitating consensus by integrating traditional knowledge and community values into conservation decisions.

The Seed Game method aligns with indigenous practices of consensus and collective decision-making, offering a tactile, visual approach that respects traditional knowledge and is accessible to all community members, regardless of literacy level.

Unlike data-driven tools that require technical expertise, the Seed Game is community-led and tactile. It allows local stakeholders to express conservation priorities that reflect social and cultural values without needing advanced knowledge.

Organizations can use the Seed Game during community consultations to gather local input. This can be combined with data tools like GIS mapping to ensure decisions are informed by both local and environmental data, fostering sustainable, community-driven conservation.

As a unique participatory tool, the Seed Game fosters inclusive, culturally relevant, and consensus-driven conservation by engaging all community voices. It honours traditional knowledge, builds trust, and offers real-time decision-making, empowering communities to create sustainable solutions rooted in shared values and ecological wisdom.

Yes, the Seed Game helps clarify differences by allowing community members to visualize their priorities, encouraging dialogue, and fostering compromise, making it valuable for managing conflicts over land or resources.

The Seed Game is adaptable to different ecosystems and can incorporate criteria specific to local environments and cultural heritage, making it relevant across different conservation challenges.

The game allows participants to weigh multiple criteria, promoting discussions that balance economic, environmental, and cultural needs, and helping communities reach decisions that reflect diverse priorities.

The Seed Game’s tactile approach ensures inclusivity by offering everyone, regardless of age or literacy, a chance to participate equally, making sure that the final outcomes represent all voices within the community.

The Seed Game engages young people in conservation, fostering responsibility and future leaders. Its interactive, visually engaging process includes all community members, creating dialogue between youth and elders, who may be less literate but possess deep knowledge of the landscape, history, and biodiversity. The Seed Game facilitates the transmission of ecological knowledge and values—insights from centuries of coexistence with nature—ensuring conservation rooted in heritage and future resilience, human and more-than-human flourishing.

By creating an inclusive platform that values each participant’s input, the Seed Game allows women and other potentially marginalized groups to contribute their conservation priorities equally, promoting more representative decision-making.

Conservation organizations can use the Seed Game for community consultations, enhancing grassroots environmental monitoring, decision-making, and strategy formulation—creating sustainable, community-driven conservation grounded in shared values and blending traditional knowledge with conservation science to help communities protect their lands.

In the Seed Game, values form the foundation of conservation decisions, much like roots support a tree. For Indigenous communities, values such as respect for the land, social harmony, and reverence for local deities guide resource management. The Seed Game helps participants prioritize these values, ensuring that conservation strategies reflect cultural beliefs and ecological wisdom. Anchoring decisions in core values, it fosters conservation practices that are sustainable and meaningful to the community.

The Seed Game is deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, recognising humans as part of an interconnected ecosystem—a society of nature that includes animals, plants, and a host of other life forms. Inspired by perspectivist thinking—the understanding that every being holds a unique perspective and values different aspects of the world—the Seed Game encourages participants to consider how conservation decisions impact all elements of the environment. This holistic approach aligns with Indigenous stewardship, ensuring conservation honors both ecological realities and cultural heritage.

The Seed Game emerged from decades of research with indigenous communities, notably Dr. Alexander Aisher’s work with the Nyishi tribe in the eastern Himalayas. Rigorously tested and developed with Keith Ellis in communities across India, it bridges indigenous wisdom with global conservation practices. Originally a simple tool for visually mapping conservation priorities, it has evolved to incorporate modern digital tools, creating a unique, scalable approach to conservation governance that blends cultural heritage with cutting-edge practices.

The Seed Game owes its name to the excitement it sparked during its first trials in indigenous communities in India. After trying it out, participants were so enthusiastic they simply called it ‘the game’. This name captures the energy and creativity the process inspires. Using seeds as a hands-on, visual tool, the game transforms complex conservation decisions into a dynamic, shared experience—sparking ideas, fostering collaboration, making every participant’s voice heard. Playful yet purposeful, the Seed Game plants the foundation for bold, community-driven conservation actions that grow into lasting impact.