Can a Board Game Teach Climate Justice?
GENCGOV at MDICAC 2026
Ask people to read a policy brief on climate governance and most will decline. Ask them to play a game about it and something different happens: they sit down, they argue, they take positions. Whether that difference amounts to anything is the question GENCGOV took to the University of Bradford’s flagship equality and inclusion conference in June.
At the 15th Making Diversity Interventions Count Annual Conference (MDICAC) on 8 June, Dr Pedi Obani presented “Gaming, Climate Change and Gender Equality” with Olayinka Olanrewaju and Nnabuike Eya. The presentation explored how games can make climate law more accessible and create new ways for people to engage with questions of climate governance and justice.
Gaming can broaden participation and invite voices that traditional research methods often miss. But participation alone should not be mistaken for equity.”
– Dr Pedi Obani
Why a game at all?
The case for gaming rests on three possibilities: that it can drive engagement, support learning and open up participatory governance to people who might never take part in a conventional consultation.
But the presentation did not treat gaming as an automatic solution. It also considered the risks of the medium itself. Research on the representation of women in video games, for example, has raised concerns about links to self-objectification, negative body image and sexist attitudes. A medium is not neutral simply because it is playful.
That distinction, between getting more people into the room and changing who the room serves, is central to GENCGOV’s approach to inclusive climate governance.
Climate Stack
The presentation drew on Climate Stack, GENCGOV’s climate justice board game, as a practical example. Co-designed over roughly three months with partners and the BD3 community in Bradford, Climate Stack was developed to make conversations about climate impacts, justice and governance more engaging, relatable and memorable. The game has been tested in university, community and corporate settings as a teaching and engagement tool.
The design brief was deliberately unacademic: fun, engaging, relatable and memorable. The questions underneath it were not. GENCGOV’s research spans climate law, human rights law and administrative law, alongside international development, data and digital governance, and pedagogy. The challenge was to translate some of those ideas into a format that people could engage with without needing specialist knowledge first.
What the research process revealed
The experience of developing Climate Stack also offered lessons about participatory research and working with communities:
- Start with a clear research question but remain open to what the process itself reveals.
- Ground innovative methods in sound methodology and ethical safeguards.
- Respect different ways of knowing, including perspectives that challenge your own.
- Invest time in building relationships with partners and communities and understanding their priorities.
- Consider the direct benefits to partners, beyond academic outputs and project deliverables.
- And, importantly, have fun while doing it.
The wider point is that innovative research methods should not be used simply because they are novel. They should help researchers ask better questions, reach different audiences and create opportunities for participation that conventional approaches may miss.
Shaping the future of inclusion
In the afternoon, Dr Obani chaired the conference panel, “Shaping the Future of Inclusion: Power, Innovation and Responsibility in a Changing World”, with Haroon Bashir of University College Birmingham, Marianne Elliott of Incommunities and Dr James Machell of the University of Bradford.
The panel brought questions of inclusion and responsibility into conversation with the changing landscape of climate law, considering how legal and governance approaches can better account for different experiences, interests and forms of knowledge.
MDICAC is organised by the University of Bradford’s Centre for Inclusion and Diversity and brings together researchers, practitioners, policymakers and students to examine how equality, diversity and inclusion can be advanced through evidence and principled leadership.
The conference was hosted by Professor Udy Archibong, Pro-Vice Chancellor for EDI at the University of Bradford, and included the annual Barbara Burford Memorial Lecture, delivered this year by Professor Emmanuel Adukwu of the University of the West of England.
For GENCGOV, the conference provided an opportunity to take one of the project’s most experimental approaches—using games to engage people with climate governance and put it into conversation with a wider field concerned with participation, inclusion and social change.
