Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In the FarmPath process, the percentage of those who agreed to participate in the first
step and continued until the final stage varied from 44% to 63% in different countries. If
participant motivation was not high during the recruitment stage it generally resulted in
non-attendance at later stages (particularly the final workshop) despite agreement to
participate. Careful selection, reinforced by researchers' assessment of each individual, was
required at the recruitment stage in order to ensure that the majority of participants were
highly motivated. Furthermore, careful structuring of the process to ensure that participants
felt valued and got something meaningful out of the process was crucial to secure their
continued engagement. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that in regions where
participants knew the research team previously, participation was more consistent. This
happened in the Czech, French and Portuguese cases, where many participants had
previously been involved in projects lead by the research team. This seems to indicate that
social capital can be accumulated between projects, and exceeds the time frame of a
project; a research group engaging in such an approach is developing a bond with the
stakeholder community, which can be reinforced at each project when results are enriching
for all parties, as well as broken if partners are disappointed.
Within the focus-group discussions in the different regions, 'Official Interests' (OI)
was the group in which the visioning exercise was most easily achieved. This was
considered to be because these individuals engage in strategic thinking exercises as part of
their professional life; they were therefore familiar with thinking in terms of visioning.
Their discourse was already well-structured. This was not the case in the remaining focus
groups, many of which produced positive comments on the novelty of approach, as many
had not previously been engaged in participatory processes. On the other hand, the group
'Those who Benefit from the Land' (BL) expressed greater difficulties in creating
regionally based visions and acknowledging the role of farming in the construction of the
physical landscape, probably due to their weak connection with the sector. Nonetheless,
during the process some questions were clarified and the discourses of some participants
changed. These results reveal the suitability of a step-by-step approach in a
transdisciplinary exercise, to allow participants to become familiar with the process.
Aiming for a co-construction process involving actors from different spheres of society
does not only imply difference in knowledge types, but also in the maturity of discourses.
Hence opportunities to better structure individual and group discourses are necessary in
order to promote subsequently balanced dialogues.
The construction of visions, or the design of desirable futures not rooted in present
situational constraints, was viewed as the most challenging task by participants. It
confirmed that innovative thinking is not easily achieved and the support of different
specific strategic methods is important if the visioning exercises are to be successful.
Nevertheless, the systemic approach to vision building, with a conceptualization followed
by the drawing of circles and arrows as described in the Methods section, was considered
by some as a schematic exercise which decreased the level of in-depth discussion. In
addition, the need to include more intervention of researchers in the vision-building step
was mentioned. During this step, the researchers in some countries were solely observers
(being involved in the discussion only in the later phase) but in the countries where the
researchers also engaged in the discussion by adding questions and providing personal
perspectives, this constraint was not mentioned by participants.
 
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