"Tracing a Pollinators' Path"project (or "Percorso Impollinatori" in Italian) aimed to engage citizens and farmers in addressing pollinators decline through the implementation of three participatory actions.
National
Italy
There were several institutions which collaborated at different levels or hosted the project, such as: Comune di Cesena; Parco Nazionale della Majella; Parco Nazionale del Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga; Comune di Montebello di Bertona.
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
The EC JRC ISPRA- Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy- was involved because it funded the project within the STING project. The fund covered the costs of the project and I worked as an external expert for JRC.
No
Yes
2022-09-03
As an individual
First name: Laura Last name: Boffi Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: via IX Febbraio 50 Town: Cesena Postal code: 47521 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 377 544 4035 E-mail:boffilaura@gmail.com Website:https://www.percorsoimpollinatori.com/
“Percorso Impollinatori” (or "Tracing a pollinators' path" in english) aimed to engage citizens and farmers in addressing pollinators decline through the implementation of participatory actions. The project was implemented in summer 2022 in two different Italian locations: Cesena and the protected territory of Abruzzo, which greatly differ for their agricultural practices.
Percorso Impollinatori follows a participatory design process which i) builds on insights from expert interviews, desk research and previous artistic/design practice; ii) unfolds as a path of three participatory actions for farmers and citizens; iii) pilots such participatory actions-based-methodology returning a series of recommendations for future iterations.
The three participatory actions included:
• “Retracing the experiences”: a participants-sourced collection of pictures on experiences of pollination and an exhibition to expand own perspectives through a scientific and artistic focus, followed by a workshop to envision “acts of care” towards such experiences;
• “Pollinators’ picnic”: a picnic for more-than-human eaters where humans are required to prepare food also for the pollinators visiting the picnic and serve it to them;
• “The Robot who wants to be a pollinator”: a rural performance in which a Robot programmed to monitor biodiversity finds its own personal reason to tackle pollinators decline, followed by a theatre representation in the farm and a workshop aiming to reframe people’s own relationship towards pollinators.
Pollinators decline
Participatory design
Citizen engagement
Participatory actions
Material deliberation
The project main aim was not to provide “the solution to the pollinators problem”, but to i) reframe the issue locally and ii) generate possible solutions, through the inclusion of relevant social actors such as citizens and farmers. The project aimed to activate new possible relationships between citizens and farmers that could produce outcomes i) and ii) by designing and implementing 3 different participatory actions in 2 different locations. Such double implementation worked as a two-sites pilot, which granted new knowledge on how to improve the 3 participatory actions in the future, so to create a solid methodology for farmers and citizens engagement, as well as initial ideas on how to address pollinators decline locally.
A specific result was the design concept of the "Pollinators technician". From the project, it resulted that people lack actionable suggestions to support pollinators and agriculture, which really focus on the local contexts at a high resolution. The “Pollinators Technician” would be a specialist of both pollinating insects and agriculture, with an extensive knowledge on both biodiversity conservation and farming.S/he has a first direct contact with a farmer and then physically visits her/him to get to know not only the farm, but also the surrounding context. Her/his duties are similar to the ones of a general practitioner who does a check-up and releases a series of suggestion or prescriptions. The co-creation of this role could be the focus of a follow up of the project.
I describe the quality of the experience by the single participatory actions.
> Retracing the experiences
Citizens and farmers submitted photos around their experiences with pollinators. The photos collection was separately curated by two different knowledge-holders – a group of ecology experts and an arts curator - in order to produce two different exhibition paths.
The double-blind curation resulted in the two exhibition paths, which enabled the exhibition visitors to to look upon themselves with new eyes. After visiting the exhibition, citizens and farmers were invited to the “Imaging acts of care” workshop, where they used the “entanglement tool, a wooden tiles-tool which made collaboration tangible by the use of elastic bands linking each other’s tiles. Participants worked in pairs and, prompted by the pictures from the exhibition, they had the choice between “maintaining”, “improving” or “repairing” the situation pictured in the photo through collaborative actions.
> Pollinators picnic
Picnics were organised in farmers’ fields during the spring/summer. Participants were prompted to prepare their own picnic food and, following a food guide suggested by the entomologist, compiled and cooked a more-than-human menu. The entomologist attended the picnic, explaining the behaviours of the insects visiting the food, helping to distinguish them, and explaining how to co-inhabit the picnic zone.
> The Robot who wants to be a pollinator
A Robot was on a mission to monitor biodiversity through his AI capabilities in farms which hosted him. Local persons visited the Robot and suggested new spots on the farm which, in their opinion, were worth being monitored. Suddenly, the Robot fell in love with flowers and aimed to become a pollinator. As he realized he couldn’t turn into a pollinator, he decided to love the flowers by protecting the pollinators. Before leaving, the Robot invited people to a final theatre performance, during which he revelead his love
Inclusion in the project needs to be understood as the inclusion of social actors, such as farmers and citizens, in the active discussion of pollinators decline. The pollinators issue usually remains a domain of scientists, experts and policy officers, while local knowledge is not integrated or equally accounted. The project instead aimed to create a methodology to unhinge such a practise and open up the discussion to the active engagement of other social actors beyond the usual ones.
Ordinary citizens and farmers have been the main protagonists of the project, the main participants of the participatory actions. Their involvement was key since the beginning of the project, which focused on their involvement in reframing the pollinators decline issue locally and generating ideas to address such decline., beyond scientific and political discourse which usually do not account for their local, indigenous knowledge.
LOCAL
> Citizens and farmers of the two selected Italian locations: main participants of the participatory actions
> Municipality of Cesena: host of the project and support in logistics, location Cesena
> Parco Nazionale del Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga: host of the project, location Abruzzo
> Parco Nazionale della Majella: host of the project, support in logistics, support in recruitment of farmers, location Abruzzo
> Municipality of Montebello di Bertona: support in logistics, location Abruzzo
NATIONAL
> Ispra (The Superior Institute for Environmental Preservation and Research in Italy): scientific advisory, collaboration in Participatory action 1 "Retracing the experiences" as the scientists made the scientific curation of the pictures
> CREA (The Council for Agricultural Research and Economics in Italy): scientific advisory, collaboration in Participatory action 2 "Pollinators' picnic" as a CREA entomologist collaborated in the picnics
> actress Arianna Saturni: performer of the Robot theatre represenation ((participatory action 3)
> artist Alice Pedroletti: the arts curator of participatory action 1 “Retracing the experiences”
EUROPEAN
> the research group headed by prof. Toke Thomas Høye, Department of Ecoscience and Arctic Research Centre of the University of Aarhus: they provided open source software for autonomous pollinators monitoring, which the main researcher integrated into the Robot who wants to be a pollinator (participatory action 3)
> the Ericsson Company Innovation Garage in Genoa. It developed the hardware and integrated the software for the rover which constitutes the Robot ((participatory action 3)
> EC JRC_Ispra: providing the funding to cover the cost of the project and supervision
Beyond the logistics support of the municipality and parks, the added value was about the possibility to enact the participatory actions in the wild and test all the institutions dynamics reacting to the innovative creative program.
Following the previous paragraphs about the involvement of different stakeholders ( including academics and experts from different disciplines and fields, artists, relevant societal actors, ordinary citizens carrying informal ways of knowing, such as those of indigenous people and local communities) the collaborators assemblage enabled a truly transdisciplinary project (beyond interdisciplinarity). Applying the participatory design approach to the design of the material deliberation methods revealed to be a twofold successful strategy: from the one hand it ensured that diverse participants were actively involved throughout all the project; on the other hand it fostered the co-creation of knowledge through the interactions of such different-knowledge holders, the participants, during the activities of each participatory actions. Each participatory action in fact required the assemblage of different teams, whose members represented specific scientific disciplines and ordinary knowledge (from scientists and artists to ordinary citizens and farmers). Any participatory action relies on a choreography of activities and participants setting up the flow of the collaborative process. Members of the team initially worked either in a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary way, while transdisciplinarity emerged along the process at different points. An example of an example of transdisciplinary dynamics is in participatory action 3 “The Robot who wants to be a pollinator”, where citizens and farmers attended to the theatrical performance staging the story of the Robot, (after the Robot had been hosted for one month by the farmers in their fields) which merged scientific and artistic content into the script, and then they reacted to the story during the workshop, thus producing the human map of pollinators-humans relationships.
"Percorso Impollinatori" methodology enabled the activation of new possible citizens-farmers relationships that could support the preservation of pollinators, which would benefit of follow up. In particular, the following learnings have been gained:
• Percorso Impollinatori as a methodology will need to reshuffle the order of its participatory actions in a way that knowledge on pollinators is provided along the way, enabling for later more meaningful and productive workshops. Citizens may lack any pollinators knowledge, which could make the workshops attempt to ideate collaborative acts with farmers challenging ;
• the interdisciplinary teams are key to the design and implementation of the actions, so that transdisciplinary knowledge can emerge;
• actions situated on the farm, like “Pollinators’ picnic” and “The Robot who wants to be a pollinator”, have an immediate positive effect, providing a safe place where to rehearse new human-to-human and human/s-to-pollinators relationships.
Being inscribed as a “life-world problem” or “societal problem”, the pollinators decline issue can’t be described as a purely scientific as it is a complex, multidimensional problem which lacks distinctive system boundaries. Beyond scientists, social actors to the pollinators decline issue, such as citizens and farmers, urge to be involved as participants in both the framing of the problem and in the generation of possible solutions, because they are the only ones who can bring into the discussion all those dimensions which remain hidden from formal ways of knowing, such as the affect, the materialities, the life-world views, the local and embodied knowledge. How to engage social actors in participating in such an effort is a matter of concern and traditional methods, such as deliberative democracy has been criticized because it will will exclude the “nondiscursive”, all those meanings and arguments which cannot be conveyed by logic, reasons and (spoken) rational argumentation. In an attempt to overcome the drawbacks of deliberation, I grounded the project on situated actions which are to be co-created and enacted in the wild by a multitude of actors in the local context, in line with the concept of “material deliberation” (by Davies et al., 2011) as a participatory deliberation process. The innovative character of the project therefore consists of the active involvement of the assemblage farmers+ citizens towards the enactment of new relationships prompted by the participatory actions.
Percorso Impollinatori follows a participatory design process which i) builds on insights from expert interviews, desk research and previous artistic/design practice; iii) involves a multiplicity of relevant subjects, such as farmers, ordinary citizens, artists, experts and scientists, to co-design and implement the actions through different activities along the project, from the early-stage exploration of the “issue” to the late-stage interventions/prototyping in the wild;
iii) unfolds as a path of three participatory actions for farmers and citizens to be perfomed in the wild.
The participatory design process has been conceived in two main parts: the preparation (as the backstage) and the enactment (the frontstage). The “backstage” phase attended to the “what is”: design ethnography methods, such as photographic cultural probes, were employed to probe existing knowledges on and relationships with pollinators ; co-creation sessions allowed collaborators to shape research tools and activities for the following enactment phase. The “fronthand” phase envisioned the “what could be”: empirical enquiry into possible futures where humans and pollinators co-exist with mutual benefit have been imagined through the use of specific design tools, as well as through the performance of specific design interventions in the wild . We refer to these two phases as “phases of participation”, with each one characterised by specific assemblages of collaboration. Indeed, each PA has been conceived as an ecosystem of participation among different actors bringing in scientific, artistic and ordinary knowledge.
The whole project has been conceived as a pilot of a citizen+ farmers engagement methodology, composed by 3 different experimental methods: the 3 participatory actions. Although the methodology needs design iteration, it is meant to be replicated and trasferred in other context and local communities.
A series of learnings on the efficacy of the "Percorso Impollinatori" methodology in activating new possible citizens-farmers relationships that could support the preservation of pollinators have been elaborated, which foregrounded that:
• Percorso Impollinatori as a methodology will need to reshuffle the order of its participatory actions in a way that knowledge on pollinators is provided along the way, enabling for later more meaningful and productive workshops. Citizens may lack any pollinators knowledge, which could make the workshops attempt to ideate collaborative acts with farmers challenging ;
• an interdisciplinary team needs to attend to the execution of the actions, so that beyond the researcher, also scientists with an ecology/pollinators background could provide insights on how to steer the actions and prompt participants in workshops;
• actions situated on the farm, like “Pollinators’ picnic” and “The Robot who wants to be a pollinator”, have an immediate positive effect, providing a safe place where to rehearse new human-to-human and human/s-to-pollinators relationships.
The project addresses the pollinators decline issue.
Pollinators decline nowadays has been recognized as one of the most threatening problems connected to the loss of biodiversity. Among many other relevant studies that have addressed this issue , the publication of the 2016 IPBES Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production constituted a major milestone in putting the decline on the policy priority shortlist. Several countries have developed and implemented national pollinator strategies or plans, as well as , in 2018 the European Commission launched the EU Pollinators Initiative. The Communication sets out a framework consisting of short- and medium-term actions aiming to a) improve the knowledge of the decline, b) address its drivers and c) promote the engagement of the society-at-large, including the formation of new collaborations. The third priority is of particular interest as it invites collaborations across different groups of actors and domains, including “the scientific community, policy makers, businesses and citizens”. Under this priority, several research projects have been funded by the European Commission to explore innovative ways of broadening the public involvement : "Tracing a Pollinators’ Path" has been among these projects, as such being directly grounded in policy that made initial steps to involving actors beyond the usual knowledge and power holders.
Wild pollinators initiatives in Italy are tightly bounded to scientific research and governmental institutions; do not account for collaborative approaches among the different stakeholders (citizens, farmers, beekeepers, businesses) and have not reached the wide audience yet. For this reason, "Tracing Pollinators' Path" has been implemented in Italy, in two different locations that greatly differ for the kind of agriculture which is practised, local community natureculture and environmental sensibility: the protected territories of Abruzzo and the territory of Cesena.
