Toolkit protocol: organising a stocktaking exercise
For any citizen 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, including any other citizen participation processes (whether invited or uninvited) on the topic. Thorough stock-taking will help you avoid reinventing the wheel and will contribute to better shaping your citizen engagement exercise by grounding it in participants' context. In other words, stock-taking allows the process to be situated.
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. Make sure such that such information is presented in a way that is fitting for the group(s) of citizens you are working with – e.g., if you are working with children or with participants with low levels of school education.
Areas to investigate
This includes things like pollinator 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 the land is used by humans, whether we speak of urban, agricultural or forested areas. Participants will likely ask a lot of questions about pollinators – so be well prepared. You might also want to invite an entomologist to be present during the events. The presentation of information should follow a ‘progressive disclosure’ mode, through which information is presented or made available to participants in layers of progressive specialisation. In other words, you should not decide a priori what level of complexity or depth is good enough for participants, but instead provide them with the means to go deeper, should they wish to.
What other participatory processes 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 exact same topics or on invited citizen participation exercises. Do take into consideration also awareness raising as well as educational and citizen science projects – this will help you understand the general level of knowledge about the topic among the communities invited to participate in your exercise. Start by investigating what issues emerged in the other processes, which might include concerns and interests of citizens, or even ideas to address the issue of concern. 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? Or was there any actions taken, following specific forms of citizen engagement? If so, see if it is appropriate to bring the relevant actors to present them.
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 and used, 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? The focus will depend on the issue you are trying to address through your process.
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 feasibly be done, and if there are specific procedures that you will need to follow to implement the ideas developed by citizens. To learn about these, you can meet with a representative from a local public institution, e.g. a municipality, can inform you about the relevant rules. As a starting point, you can follow the links to find basic information about policies and actions across EU countries and at the EU level.
Who are the 'key players' in the area and what is their position on pollinators or more broadly on biodiversity issues? What other actors influence or affect the issue of concern? What are the relationships among them and with the publics? Would they join your process to contribute their knowledge? Are there potential allies and collaborators or organisations that could support you in some way? Could they support implementation of the results from your process?
Why do we care about pollinators? What associations do they bring up? How do we relate to them? What do they symbolise? What role do they play in the stories we tell? These are just some of the questions that refer to the possible meanings that pollinating insects can have for people. These meanings can be cultural (like seeing honeybees as ‘hard working’) or personal (being stung by a wasp). In many instances, they will have a lot of influence over how much people are interested or invested in the topic and on their attitudes. These meanings can also be very tightly related to how pollinators are discussed in the public sphere – e.g., by shaping common narratives. To understand further the diversity of meanings of pollinators, and so to acquire more sensibility to noticing these, you can look at Chapter 5 of the IPBES report on pollinators.
Getting familiar with narratives in the media
One aspect of stock taking we would like to spend more time on is a basic understanding of ideas about pollinators that circulate in public media. Whether you look at scientific papers, traditional media, agricultural magazines, gardening blogs, industry statements or social media posts, they all present pollinators and issues associated with them in a particular light (e.g., impact of climate change on 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 these outlets actors, events, relationships, facts, causal relations, arguments are brought together to shape specific narratives. An obvious place to start is with media publications and here we focus only on media narrative analysis.
A narrative, in a most basic sense, is a particular representation of the world, its inhabitants and events. Narratives are everywhere, being part of texts, images, mundane objects, etc. Narratives articulate, for example, values, identities, visions, aspirations, promises, assumptions, ideals and beliefs. They foreground particular ways of seeing, understanding and interpreting the world, and therefore reflect the positions of their 'narrators'. Media narrative analysis helps with unpacking both the implicit assumptions about pollinators and the intentions of the narrators to present events and actions in a particular light. You will understand what is important to whom, why, based on what assumptions and claims. This is important because participatory processes are often about putting narratives in a constructive dialogue, which might include questioning their assumptions, reflecting on tensions between them, identifying points of contact, imagining the consequences of their promises and assumptions. Hence, by being aware of the dominant narratives you will enable participants to challenge them during the process, this way eventually expanding the terms of the debate.
Narrative analysis is something that is ideally carried out by an expert that specialises this type of studies. But here are some initial considerations for you as an organiser:
- 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, local or international media? 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 help 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.
- If the topic is very sensitive and you want to know exactly what kind of narratives are intentionally promoted, whether particular actors’ interests stand-out in the form of ‘assumptions’, or whether there are claims not backed-up by any type of evidence, you might need a more extensive study.
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 narrative
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 narrative
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.