Socio-Technical Scenario workshops: an innovative tool to involve stakeholders
The general objective of these workshops organized during 2021 was to “Explore the future role of advice to support farmers in making agriculture more sustainable.” This was done in a workshop in each AgriLInk partner country with advisors, farmers and some other actors (e.g. policy-makers) from a specific innovation area. Jointly, they explored future changes in the coming decades towards more sustainable agricultural systems with a special attention for the role of advice and advisory services in these change processes.
The main function of these workshops was to discuss and validate the various draft recommendations that had been developed through the integrated assessment in the project and to explore (new) courses for advisory services that might contribute to a more sustainable agriculture.
In the AgriLink original planning, the STSc workshops would take place in May-June 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 restrictions it was impossible to hold workshops during that period. Neither was it possible to train partners in using the workshop method at a face-to-face meeting that was originally planned for April 2020 but that had to be cancelled. We subsequently waited until the fall of 2020 to see if workshops might be held live in the foreseeable future. When this appeared not to be the case we not only had to reschedule but we also had to redesign the workshop method to be able to hold it online and subsequently train partners in using this new method. We also had to develop a new method for this online training which appeared to be a challenge in itself. These trainings eventually were completed by February 2021.
Workshops were then held from March – August 2021. Partners had a long period for organising them as the whole spring period is a very busy period for farmers and advisors and it was therefore difficult to find sufficient numbers of participants for the workshop. Eventually, all partners were able to hold their workshops and submitted their workshop reports which are the basis for this deliverable.
The STSc method has been developed to explore what various actors can do to make a certain domain (in our case agriculture or a specific agricultural subsector) more sustainable. The method uses three general steps:
• Vision building: develop one or more future visions (e.g. for the year 2040) of a sustainable system for the domain of interest (the agricultural sub-sector that the chosen innovation seeks to link up to or may even transform);
• Backcasting: Develop a set of plausible ‘transition pathways’, i.e. a set of innovation and change processes that lead from the present situation to the future visions;
• Reflection: Reflect on the transition pathways by zooming in on the role of specific stakeholders of interest (in AgriLink advisors) and what they can do under various circumstances to help realise more sustainable visions.
Originally, the workshops were planned to be held face-to-face but due to the COVID-19 restrictions most of the workshops were held online for which a simplified version of the methodology was developed.
In each country, the workshops focused on an innovation topic that partners had also analysed in their case-study research in WP2. Since these topics were very varied, the outcomes of the workshops varied as well. Yet, there were various common themes that came up during many of the workshops:
• Knowledge sharing
• Tailoring advice
• Need for integral advice
• Networking, farmer-to-farmer learning
• Independence of advice
• Missing competences: training and coordination
• AKIS coordination
• Policy support, societal embedding
• Creating synergies
Many of these themes also featured in the draft version of the integrated assessment and thus these workshops provided a validation of these results. However, the workshop also rendered some new insights that had not yet been identified on the basis of the case study work.
One of the most striking results from the workshops, that was raised in many of them, was the need for more integral advice rather than advice on single aspects, e.g. not only on crop protection but on growing crops more broadly. Such findings could emerge because this method starts by taking an encompassing view at the requirements for sustainable agriculture. This brought participants to conclude that more integral advice would be needed to realise future sustainable farming systems. Such outcomes provide strong evidence of the value of this forward looking scenario method and how it can render valuable results that did not emerge from other methods.
List of STSc workshops organized:
- BELGIUM: HOW TO SUPPORT THE FARMER IN HIS ROLE AS ENERGY PRODUCER FOR OTHERS?
- CZECH REPUBLIC: IMPROVING THE ROLE OF ADVISORY SERVICES FOR FUTURE CZECH SUSTAINABLE FARMING
- FRANCE: THE FUTURE OF FARMING ADVICE: EXPLORING THE NEED FOR IMPROVING/REINFORCING FARMING ADVICE TO INTRODUCE LEGUMES IN SOUTH WEST FRANCE (OCCITANIA AND NEW AQUITAINE)
- GREECE: EFFECTIVE ADVISORY SERVICES FOR SUSTAINABLE FARMING IN GREECE
- ITALY: THE FUTURE OF FARM ADVICE FOR SUSTAINABLE SOIL MANAGEMENT IN ITALIAN VITICULTURE
- LATVIA: ENVISIONING THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURAL ADVICE FOR SUSTAINABLE HORTICULTURE IN LATVIA
- NETHERLANDS: THE FUTURE OF FARMING ADVICE IN THE AREA OF CROP PROTECTION IN THE NETHERLANDS
- NORWAY: THE FUTURE OF FARMING ADVICE: EXPLORING THE NEED FOR ADVICE TO SUSTAIN DAIRY FARMING IN THE REGION OF TRØNDELAG, NORWAY
- POLAND: THE FUTURE OF FARMING ADVICE: DEVELOPMENT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES IN RURAL AREAS IN POLAND
- PORTUGAL:HOW TO FOSTER SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITION IN THE DOURO WINE REGION: ADVISORY GAPS AND SUGGESTIONS TO OVERCOME THEM
- ROMANIA: FUTURE OF DIRECT MARKETING – SMALL FARMERS’ COOPERATIVES IDENTIFIES THE NEED FOR STRONGER LOCAL AKIS
- SPAIN (NAVARRA): THE FUTURE OF FARMING ADVICE: EXPLORING THE NEED FOR FARMING ADVICE IN THE AREA OF DIRECT MARKETING IN NAVARRA
- UK (SCOTLAND): THE FUTURE OF FARMING ADVICE: EXPLORING THE NEED FOR FARMING ADVICE IN VARIABLE RATE PRECISION FARMING IN THE NORTH EAST OF SCOTLAND.
