Toolkit protocol: organising a stocktaking exercise
For any engagement process to be successful, it is necessary to build on a comprehensive understanding of the issue at hand and the work done thus far. A thorough stock-taking will help you better respond to the local situation, and you will avoid reinventing the wheel. But bear in mind that such background study is not just for you as an organiser. Ideally you will share an introductory overview of the issue with participants before the event.
Areas to investigate
It is important to understand the environmental context, which includes things like the species that are present in the area, their conservation status, the problems they struggle with, the dominant ecosystems – or those of particular interest. Don’t focus only on the ‘natural’ environment. Just as important are the ways that the land is used by humans, whether we speak of urban or agricultural areas. Participants will likely ask a lot of questions about pollinators and often join participatory processes to learn more – so be well prepared.
It rarely happens that you will be the first person working on pollinators, even if it’s not a mainstream environmental topic. What other process and events have been organised in the area you are interested in and by whom? Don’t limit yourself to initiatives that focused on the same topics and take into consideration also awareness raising, educational and citizen science projects – this will help you understand the general level of knowledge about the topic. Strat by investigating what issues emerged in the other processes - this might include key concerns and interests of citizens, which might be something impacting the direction of your process. Take notice of the difficulties that the initiatives struggled with. Perhaps there is lack of knowledge on pollinators or there are strong social tensions about it. This will help you prepare your process better. Were there any recommendations produced that you could use as a starting point for your project? If so, see if you can bring their authors to present them. Who are the 'key players' in the area and what is their position on pollinators or more broadly on biodiversity issues? Would they join your process to contribute their knowledge? Are there potential allies and collaborators or organisations that could support you in some way?
Practices relate to all the things that people do in places they inhabit or visit. This ranges from the way we do shopping to the way that green spaces are managed, so you will likely have to narrow down the scope of interest. For instance, who uses the green spaces in the city? How do they use them? Does it influence pollinators?
What are they key legal frameworks in place that have impact on pollinators? This might be a national or local pollinator strategy, but it might also be a legislation on green spaces in urban areas or guidelines on pesticides use. Make sure you also understand what can be done, and if there are specific procedures that you will need to follow to implement the ideas developed by citizens. See if a representative from a local public institution, e.g. a municipality, can present the relevant rules during the process.
Getting familiar with narratives
One aspect of stock taking we would like to spend more time on is a basic understanding of ideas about pollinators that circulate in the public space. Whether you look at scientific papers, agricultural magazines, gardening blogs, industry statements or social media posts, they all present pollinators and issues associated with them (impact of climate change of the movement of species; using commercially available bumblebee colonies; selecting prettiest and bee friendly flowers; negligent impact of pesticides on insects when administered in the right way; complaints about a new way to manage green spaces in a local park) in a particular light. They pick some actors, events, relationships, facts, causal relations, arguments and tie them together in a particular way. As such, they all use narratives.
A narrative, in a most basic sense, is a particular presentation of the world, its inhabitants and events. We all make use of narratives all the time. Most of the time we do it unconsciously as we tell stories about events, and it is a way of telling others what is important to us and why. In other instances (political speeches, industry catalogues) narratives can used strategically to achieve specific impact. They are also a way to articulate values, identities, visions, aspirations and beliefs. Because narratives always exclude some aspects of reality, they foreground particular ways of seeing, understanding and interpreting the world.
Through a narrative analysis you can unpack both the implicit assumptions on which we build our lives and the intentional attempts to present events and actions in a particular light. You will understand what is important to whom, why, based on what assumptions. This is done not to select and then repat a specific narrative. Participatory processes are very much about putting narratives in a constructive dialogue, which might include questioning their assumptions, reflecting on tensions between them, identifying points of contact, imagining their consequences. Hence, being aware of the dominant narratives you will be able to challenge them during the process, this way eventually expanding the terms of the debate.
A narrative analysis is something that you can do as an organiser – or together with participants (see Stock-Taking Stories and Blueprint 1). Whatever the case, there are some initial considerations:
- How does the narrative analysis connect to the purpose of your process? If you run a co-creation project for a local park, the purpose of narrative analysis will likely be to understand the concerns of different groups of citizens. If you run a deliberation process on the pesticides use in agriculture, you should carefully analyse stakeholders’ public communication campaigns to understand the way they strategically used narratives to push their respective agendas – and how this could have impacted the public debate.
- Having determined the purpose, you should consider the scope of resources: Will you focus on general media or also include specialised media? If you will be including specific groups like, e.g., farmers, then looking at agricultural magazines will be important. Will you look at national media or local – or international? Even if you are doing a very local process, it is likely that people are exposed to national media as well. A comparison between the two levels might be good to understand the local specificity. Will you look at digital or 'traditional' media? Plenty of local communication has moved online to places like social media groups. If you engage with elderly, on the other hand, they might be only exposed to print, TV or radio.
How to carry out a narrative analysis? This will depend on how extensive you need the analysis to be. If your topic is very sensitive and you want to know exactly what kind of narratives are intentionally promoted, sometimes to spread disinformation, you might want to collaborate with an expert. Many academics specialise in narrative analysis, and they will be able to advise you on the protocol and work with you to carry it out. For most other purposes, were you want to get a general idea of the state of the public debate on an issue, it will be enough carefully read the selection of texts you decided on, paying attention to the following aspects:
- Who are the actors mentioned? What do they do? What are their concerns, motivations, aims? How do they relate to pollinators?
- How are pollinators described? Which terms and concepts are used?
- Why are pollinators important? E.g., food security, ecological meltdown, loss of income, responsibility to future generations?
- What happens to the actors and pollinators? What are the events and situations being described? Why are they important?
- Where are the events unfolding? Why are these places important?
- What needs to be done? Why? What is the promise behind this?
- What metaphors are used?
- What is not said?
Pay attention to recurring patters in the use of the above elements. E.g., are some actors always described in the same way, are they always seen as engaging in same actions? Are the places or events described using particular terms? If metaphors are used in descriptions – why is that? What do they communicate? These questions relate to the texts themselves. But it is just as interesting, however, to take a step back and ask: Who are the authors of the texts? Who are their audiences? Where are the texts published? This way you can also start understanding not only what the narratives are, but also who promotes them and to which audiences.
No pollinator decline, but rather pollinator protection or conservation
There is no significant public discussion on pollinators decline. The discussion is framed, at best, as pollinator protection or pollinator conservation, depending on the point of reference invoked: the need to protect honeybees and beekeepers’ interests or alignment with EU recommendations on pollinators, respectively. Framing the issue as protection or conservation skirts the acknowledgement of a current, urgent problem and rather focuses on protecting the current conservation states for pollinators.
Citizens are not yet part of the debate
The debate is not taking place in the large public arena and does not involve ordinary citizens. The debate is located mostly in the context of institutional interactions with the government, and in particular with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The main actors involved in the debate are, on the one hand, beekeepers/beekeepers’ associations and a handful of conservation or sustainable agriculture NGOs, and, on the other, farmers’ and agricultural input suppliers’ associations. Neither seems to be interested in opening the debate to a larger, public arena.
Perception of pollinators
Insects and even honeybees generally have a negative image for the public. While bee products are seen as beneficial, and the honeybee as “honest” and “hardworking”, the overall image is one that implies danger and the possibility of physical harm.
No wild pollinators, but rather proxies
There is no conversation on pollinators per se, but rather the conversation uses two proxies to get at the issue: (1) honeybees and their fate and (2) agricultural practices that affect landscapes or landscape structure (in particular in high nature value agricultural landscapes). There are no significant mentions of natural habitats or urban areas as spaces relevant to the issue of pollinating insects. These choices are circumscribed first of all by a political logic by those involved, to tackle the issue in terms that already have a public currency and can mobilize existing political actors. These discursive terms also articulate well with the limited scientific knowledge base as well as with the existing environmental and agri-environmental policies at both European and national level.
Economic value framing
The debate is dominated by an economic framing, and not an ethical one (one that would find the need for protecting biodiversity or for the beauty of nature as sufficient arguments for pollinators protection). The framing is not necessarily contested by any of the main participating parties, and it seems to both offer a common language and to lock the debate in a context with no foreseeable solution. First, honeybees (Apis melifera) are not seen as biodiversity or biodiversity agents, but as livestock and capital. Beekeepers stake their claims on their status as farmers and as business owners directly affected by pesticides and in particular by neonicotinoids. Farmers’ opposition to pesticides/neonicotinoids bans is also framed in economic terms, as economic losses and as harming their very ability to continue to practice agriculture – without neonicotinoids, they argue both in their official political lobby and their publications, crops would fail, and they would suffer irremediable losses. Finally, despite the dominance of the economic framing, pollination is not discussed as a valuable ecosystem service that should be protected and rewarded. Pollination is timidly mentioned in the farmers’ specialised press, but it seems to be taken for granted, as a natural process that is simply part of nature’s laws (akin to water evaporation) and completely removed from an ecological context (for example, pollinators needing particular habitats for their entire life cycle).
Exceptionalism
The request for neonicotinoids emergency authorisations is founded on a belief that this country's situation is singular, significantly different from that of other countries in the EU. Farmers argue in their lobby as well as in numerous articles in the specialised press that in here the degree of infestation with the target pests is much higher, that the pests are more resistant to treatments and the farmers’ vulnerability much higher compared to other countries in the EU. The argumentation goes even further: this country is special in that the use of pesticides is actually much lower than in the rest of the Union (both current and historical), there are more bees here and the numbers are actually going up, there is much more biodiversity, and environmental protection and conservation benchmarks set for Western Europe have already been passed. Therefore, the argument goes, policies designed in Brussels for the rest of the Union cannot be appropriate for here.